The Survival Code, page 23
Backup.
This place is for backup.
Oh God.
“Hello?” she says when I don’t answer.
“I think this is the proof. The proof that Carver planned the attacks on his own banks.”
“What?” she exclaims.
I can’t put it into words. How I just sense that this is the base of operations for The Opposition’s plan. The Opposition created this data center as one last safety measure after they planned the explosions at the banks. It’s one big backup plan.
But the bank data hadn’t been restored yet.
Something must have gone wrong.
Something that probably has to do with Dad.
MacKenna wants more answers, but we have no time.
We have to keep going.
We arrive at the door on the opposite side of the room. We go through it and find ourselves in another beige hallway. This side of the building is lined with more offices, and they have windows. Through one, I spot the back of a small man with neon purple hair facing three large, glowing monitors.
His terminal is our way in.
I motion for MacKenna to join me at the door to the office. She pushes down the handle. Slow. Slow. Slow. And then opens the door silently.
Breathe.
The room is divided into twenty or so empty cubicles. On the far side of the room, a couple of the overhead fluorescent lights are on, but on our side, we’ve got only the glow coming from the one guy’s monitors.
We really don’t need to bother being so quiet. Even from across the room, I can hear screamo music blaring through the dude’s oversize headphones.
But still. We creep.
I glance around. On a table near the door, I see a box of orange extension cords. MacKenna frowns at me as I grab one. Wrapping the edges of the cord around my hands as I walk, I skulk across the industrial carpet. My bare feet are silent.
Soft.
Quiet.
Steps.
I position myself directly behind the guy’s head of greasy, bright violet hair, hold the plastic cord so tight that it cuts into my fingers. As fast as I can, I reach my arms over the man’s head and wrap the extension cord around his neck. He wriggles under my grip, gasping for breath and clawing at the cord. His headphones get knocked off his head, with one of the speakers blasting music into his cheek.
“You’re choking him,” MacKenna says in a panicked voice. “You’re gonna kill him.”
I pull him back, tipping his chair. He knocks over a wire mesh pencil holder full of all different colored highlighters and several pens as he crashes to the ground.
My mouth falls open at the sight of the face falling onto the cheap blue, military carpet.
I release the cord, letting it drop down to the floor as well.
What’s left of my heart might break.
It’s Terminus.
DR. DOOMSDAY’S GUIDE TO ULTIMATE SURVIVAL
RULE ELEVEN: SAVE YOURSELF. IN THE END, THAT MIGHT BE ALL YOU CAN DO.
Terminus gets up and puts his hands in the air. “Okay, Jinx. Okay. Let’s not do anything we’re both going to regret here.”
He looks a lot different than the last time I saw him. It’s been a year since he graduated and we used to see each other in real life. He’s thinner, dyed his hair and has completely lost the tan he got while working summers for his dad’s landscaping company. He’s white as a ghost.
I eye the cord on the ground. “I should kill you.”
MacKenna is shocked. “You two know each other?”
“Terminus,” he says with a nod as he sinks in his chair. He makes a couple of clicks with the mouse and the music goes quiet.
“Your name is Terminus?” MacKenna asks. She side-eyes me.
“As far as you’re concerned it is,” he says. “Terminus was a Roman god who—”
“His name is Harold Partridge,” I say through clenched teeth. “He’s a hacker who’s known for—”
“Do not call me Harold.” Terminus scowls.
Everything that’s happened.
Everything makes perfect sense now.
Everything.
A hatred is building, creeping through my skin and into my bones. I pick up the phone cord and grab his office chair, sending him spinning a few feet past MacKenna and onto the carpet again.
“I’m going to call you an undertaker, you backstabbing piece of garbage.”
He gets up but stays on his knees.
All I see is red. Blood. Fire. Rage.
My knees tense and I prepare to lunge at my old friend.
MacKenna steps in front of me. “Jinx! What are you doing? We have to find my dad. And you can’t just go around killing people.”
Out of breath, I huff. “Oh really? Well...let me introduce you to the guy...who framed Jay Novak.”
“Who...what...?” MacKenna asks, dumbfounded.
I’m such a fool. I should have seen it. From the very beginning.
Terminus wrote the Day Zero exploit.
Trust no one.
I jab my finger in the air. “It’s him. He’s the one who hacked Jay’s laptop. He wrote the code that caused the explosions at the bank. Then he told me where to find it, probably thinking I’d destroy the evidence.”
Teminus tries to look charming. “That would have been helpful.”
Tightening the cord between my fingers, I make an attempt to step around MacKenna. She blocks me again.
I have to make her understand. “He told me where Jay was being held. He all but dared me to show up here.” I truly hate myself. I should have seen all of this coming. The reason that they brought Jay here of all places was probably because of Terminus. My dad’s old student knew enough about our adventures in the desert to be able to make an educated guess as to where we’d go. And he knew he’d be able to use Jay to lure us here with the evidence.
I duck around her to look Terminus right in the face. “Why?”
“When Marshall backed out, they called me. I’m his best student,” he says. “Who else would they choose?”
“I’m asking,” I say through clenched teeth, “why you did it. You’re for The Opposition?”
There’s a pause before he speaks. “I’m for cryptocurrency. There’s a war coming, Jinx, and when it gets here. I want to be on my own private atoll in the Maldives. They would have found someone. If not me, then someone.”
“Screw you. Where’d you get Jay’s security credentials?” I ask.
“Tork,” Terminus answers. “He keeps saying they’ve got someone on the inside.”
“On the inside of what?” MacKenna demands.
“I don’t know. I mean, he’s not exactly a real chatty fellow, you know.”
“You killed two thousand people!”
Terminus rises to his feet and takes a small step toward his computer. “I wrote a piece of code. What I did was nothing more than ones and zeroes. Characters on a screen.”
“Don’t you dare touch that keyboard, you human slug. You disgust me.”
Terminus squints at me with what I now see as his beady little weasel eyes. “Oh, you think you’re so morally superior? Deep down in places you don’t want to talk about, The Opposition appeals to you too. You just can’t admit it. Why do you think you like playing Republicae so much? What is that game really? A simulator with an all-powerful person in charge. You control everything from life and death to economics and morality with absolute impunity. Because some part of you believes the world would be better if one person ran things. As long as it was the right person. Marshall thinks the same. He put all his faith in one man. Except maybe he chose wrong.”
I scowl at him. “If Carver is the wrong man, why are you helping him?”
Terminus slouches. “I told you. My services are available to the highest bidder.”
For a minute, I can’t speak. Terminus doesn’t realize, or care, that he’s sold out our friendship too. This is oddly devastating.
He mistakes me and continues on. “What? You think this makes me worse than your father? You’d be happier if I was a true believer in Carver’s neo-fascist bull?”
I shake my head. “Say what you want about my dad. He refused to help Carver blow up those banks.”
Terminus turns red and waves his hand in the air. “Right. All he did was set up this place. Carver is starting a revolution and Maxwell Marshall is its IT department.”
This isn’t getting us anywhere. The clock is ticking, and I want to get as far from Terminus as possible. To MacKenna, I say, “We need to get on with it. They’ll be coming for us any moment now. We have to find Toby and Jay and get out of here.”
Terminus runs his fingers through his curly purple hair. “The base is under attack, so you may have more time than you think. Jinx. Listen to me. I did what I did. You don’t have to like it, but I can help you out now.”
MacKenna eyes him uncertainly. “How can you help?”
My hands ball up into fists. “He won’t help.”
MacKenna gives me a look of warning. Part of me knows she’s right. If we can help Jay and Mom, we have to focus on that.
Terminus has the nerve to look almost hurt or offended. “Yes. I can. I need to get to my computer.” He picks up his office chair.
I glance at MacKenna and she nods.
I hate Harold Partridge.
But we’re desperate.
“Fine, Harold, but so you know, I can kill you before anyone can get in here to help.”
He pushes his chair behind his desk and sits down.
MacKenna and I stand directly behind him.
Terminus jiggles his mouse and the screens power to life. His hands hover over the keyboard and he speaks to us like a professor giving a lecture. “The first thing I’m gonna do is report a situation normal over here to buy some time.”
He types in his username and password, unplugs his headphones and pulls a USB microphone toward him.
I’m ready with the phone cord.
“Blue 1 reporting. Building clear. Situation normal.”
“Roger.” A voice comes over the computer speakers.
“Okay,” Terminus says. He fills the monitors with images from the base’s CCTV system. He makes a few taps until we see an image of Jay in a cell, sitting on a bunk and reading a book, another one of Mom in some kind of a waiting area staring out a large window, and finally we see Toby, crouching behind a desert-camo Jeep.
“All right. Here we go,” Terminus says.
The building where Jay is being held has computerized locks, which Terminus releases with a few clicks. It must make some kind of a noise, because Jay looks up in surprise, gets up and approaches the door. Next Terminus accesses Goldwater’s lighting system. He flashes the floodlights repeatedly on a large beige building until it attracts Toby’s attention.
Toby ducks out from behind the Jeep and makes a run for it.
MacKenna watches all this. She taps Terminus on the shoulder. “Why did they choose my dad? The bank has dozens of people working in security. Why my dad?”
“No idea, sweetheart,” Terminus says without looking up from his console. “That information is need-to-know, and I guess I don’t need to know.”
He opens what looks like the camera admin systems.
I fight off the urge to yank Terminus’s rotten eggplant hair. But I’m wondering...
“Why are you still here?” I ask him. “Your code worked. They’ve got Jay. What do they need you for?”
Terminus’s face turns red. “Marshall’s little piece of malware has crawled through all of the bank systems, including this server farm right here, which was supposed to be the backup of the backup. They’ve got me trying to figure it out.”
He’s looking for Dad’s encryption key. He won’t find it.
“You won’t beat my dad.”
His face flushes red. “I got Day Zero to work. He couldn’t.”
I snort. “You probably just took Dad’s old work and tweaked it like some script kiddie. And Dad clearly saw something like this coming. That’s why he wrote the malware. He says your code looks like shit, Harold.”
MacKenna stares at the image of Toby running across the base.
Terminus is suddenly sincere. “When you saw Marshall, did he say why he did it? Why he took out the bank data?” It occurs to me just then that my dad was like a father figure to him. That he wanted a way to preserve that connection.
“No,” I say flatly.
Terminus makes a few more clicks with his mouse and the screens go blank, replaced by frantic static.
“What happened?” MacKenna asks, still watching where Toby was a moment before.
“He took out the camera system,” I say.
Her lips press into a thin line. “Now we can’t see what’s going on.”
“But neither can anyone else.”
Terminus turns to me with a bit of hope in his face, like we just finished a game of counterstrike at computer camp or something. “Okay. If you take a right out of this office and go to the end of the hall, it’s a straight shot to the citadel where they’re holding Novak.”
We have to go.
MacKenna is thinking hard. “Can you get a message out of here?” she asks Terminus.
“A message?” he repeats.
“We need to warn the country. Tell them what’s going on.”
Terminus shakes his head. “What’s going on is that all communication from this base is monitored. What’s going on is that Ammon Carver declared martial law last night. This base is a perfectly legal use of his emergency powers. There’s nothing to warn people about.”
“Except the end of the world,” she shoots back.
A voice comes across the intercom. “Is the video feed running over there?”
“Negative,” Terminus says into his microphone.
There is no time. “Give me your shoes,” I tell him.
He frowns but does toss me his high-tops. I stuff my feet into them. They’re a size or so too big, but better than nothing.
MacKenna bounces up and down on her heels a couple of times.
Getting ready.
To run.
We make our way to the office door. When I open it, we can hear shouts from outside. “They’re never gonna stop coming after us, are they?”
Terminus swivels in his chair. “They’re not after you at all. They want Marshall.”
I turn to go.
“Jinx. I hope you make it,” Terminus calls.
“I hope I never see you again,” I call back.
They want Marshall.
That phrase sticks with me as we go.
We leave the room and run toward the double doors at the end of the hall. MacKenna throws one open, and we keep running out onto the base. We’re near the edge, up against the chain-link fence that forms the perimeter.
Mud squishes under the high-tops. I glance over my shoulder to see water running out through a plastic pipe coming from the roof. Probably condensation from the massive AC needed to keep the data center so cold.
Running as fast as we can, we head along the data center building toward the citadel that Terminus showed us on the screen. He left the floodlights on, so it’s easy to spot. MacKenna’s a much better runner than I am, and she overtakes me after a few paces.
There isn’t much time to think about that. Or formulate much of a plan.
More gunfire erupts and there’s another boom. More smoke rises from a position on the opposite side of the base.
“What the hell is going on out here?” MacKenna shouts.
We stop at the end of the data center, waiting for a moment of calm in the chaos to make a break for the detention center.
But then.
I see Toby.
He and Jay and Mom are peeking around the corner of a building opposite ours. I don’t know how they got out of the citadel at the center of the base, but there they are. They run in our direction and I’m flooded with intense relief. Jay and Mom look basically okay. Toby is alive.
This feeling. Maybe this is why Dad always said to focus on survival. The search for the truth is cold. Survival is like fire; the desire for it ignites and explodes inside you.
I have a thousand more questions but I don’t get to ask.
I say “Mom” and MacKenna shouts “Dad!” at the same time.
There’s hugging and crying.
“What the hell is she doing here?” MacKenna asks.
“Mac,” Jay says, shaking his head.
For an instant I think MacKenna must be talking about Mom.
But my gaze darts up, and I see what she means. Toby has someone with him. She is a girl. A little bit older than me. Tall. Blonde. Perfect. There’s something very familiar about her ultrahigh cheekbones and anime-big blue eyes. She’s got this look about her. Like she’s an actress who’s been cast in an action movie. She’s wearing perfectly pressed khaki shorts with rolled up cuffs and a camo-green T-shirt that’s knotted to show off a little bit of abs.
I’m conscious of the fact that I’m bloody and filthy and probably look like I haven’t changed my clothes in two days.
MacKenna scowls. “Toby! I asked you a question. What—”
Things happen fast.
More gunfire.
Shouts from inside the comm building.
A green supply truck backs through the fence, knocking down a section of chain links right in front of us.
We’re caught.
I clutch my sweater, trying to pretend it’s a piece of armor that might protect me.
Breathe.
I screw everything up.
I let Terminus lead me into a trap.
I decided to go ogle a bunch of Nutanix servers and totally screwed up the one chance I had to get us out of here. And for what? To find out my one friend murdered a lot of people? I could have maybe lived happily ever after without that intel.
