The Survival Code, page 9
The feed from the camera that my dad has mounted high on a weather vane on the roof appears on monitor one and turns my blood to ice.
In the distance, a cop car turns onto the dirt road that heads to the house.
And then another. And another. And another.
They’re coming for us.
“Jinx, there isn’t much time.” Mom sounds like she’s calling from another planet.
Charles rustles in his bunk. “Jinx? Jinx? Is that Mom?”
I wave my arm frantically at him to be quiet.
“They’re using some obscure antiterrorism law to hold Jay without arraigning him, without even arresting him. They’re going to transport him somewhere within the next hour or so. I called in a big favor from one of your dad’s old friends, and he was able to convince the National Police to let me go too. But I don’t know where they’re taking us.”
Charles stands behind me now. “Jinx? Can I talk to Mom?”
“Listen to me,” Mom says. “If there’s any hope at all, you need to find your father.”
Charles makes a grab for the phone. “Mom? Mom?”
The line of cop cars has come into view of the mailbox camera.
Oh God.
“Hope?” I repeat stupidly. Hope for what? “Find Dad? How will that help?”
Mom continues in a flat voice. “Your father knows people. People in The Opposition. He knows what to do. He might be able to negotiate. He might be able to help Jay.”
“How can I... How do you think...” How do you find someone who’s unfindable?
The pings of the alarm grow louder and more frequent. MacKenna sits up in her bunk. “What the hell is going on?”
“Don’t get caught by the police. They’ll want to hold you. Perhaps use you as leverage to force Jay to take a plea. Find your father,” Mom repeats one last time.
The line goes dead.
We’re on our own.
I can’t breathe.
I scramble to my bunk and force my Cons onto my feet.
“We have to get out of here. Now!” I toss MacKenna’s boots in her direction.
She stands up and rubs her eyes. “What are you talking about?”
Before I answer, her eyes widen at the images on the screen behind me.
I scoop my groggy brother off his bed, grab the bags and head up the stairs.
The last image I see on the screen is a nondescript black sedan approaching the house.
I already know.
It’s Tork.
DR. DOOMSDAY’S GUIDE TO ULTIMATE SURVIVAL
RULE FOUR: DO WHAT YOU HAVE TO DO. THINGS WILL BREAK DOWN FASTER THAN EXPECTED.
This is all my fault.
I was getting sloppy. Making mistakes.
According to the drill, someone was supposed to stay awake to keep watch.
I push my brother up the ladder and into the shed.
Thankfully, it takes less time to get out of the bunker than to get in.
And I don’t bother relocking anything. Any amount of time the cops spend searching the place actually helps us. We need every second we can get.
Outside, the sun is fully up. It’s probably about eight or nine.
As I drag Charles along, he’s asking questions like, “What did Mom say? Where are we going? What’s happening?” with MacKenna right on our heels.
“Zip it!” I whisper.
I take us to the truck with a camper shell on the back, the closest vehicle to the shed. Because Dad’s nothing if not predictable, I find the keys to the truck in a magnetic holder in the wheel well of the driver’s side rear tire. They jingle in my hands as I walk to my door. When I open it, I’m knocked back by the stench of gasoline. This old truck reeks.
Both MacKenna and Charles hesitate.
From in front of the house, there’s a cacophony of police radios, car doors slamming and shouted instructions. We need to leave before the cops make their way to the back. I shove my bags onto the floor of the passenger seat.
I swear I hear someone shout, “Tork!”
My mouth turns dry and dusty.
“Let’s go.”
The two of them get their butts in gear and get into the truck. MacKenna takes the front seat while my brother shimmies through a small window into the camper.
The truck rumbles to a start. It shakes and sputters every minute or so, but it runs. I pray there’s enough noise in the front that we attract no notice.
I experiment with the pressure on the gas pedal, trying to get the truck going fast but kicking up as little dust as possible. We drive out the back. Dad planted a few rows of mesquite trees, which should be enough to cover us until the road dips down and we can no longer be seen from the house. We’ve done plenty of drills snaking around Castle Rock on a series of dirt roads and trails. We’ll do that until we hit the highway.
Once we’re away from the house a little bit, MacKenna says, “It reeks in here.”
“Roll down your window,” I say. The truck really is ancient and has the old-fashioned hand cranks. They could use some oil, but we get them down. After a minute or so, I can only sort of smell the gas fumes.
But we’re getting covered in dust.
MacKenna coughs. “I don’t get it. I don’t get what we’re doing.”
She saw the fifty cops rolling up to the house just like I did. “What do you mean?”
“You said nobody could get in the bunker. And there’s about a hundred years’ worth of food and a power generator. Shouldn’t we stay in there? Isn’t that Rule 3 of that dumb book?”
If our dad has a prime directive, this is it. Stay safe. Never move from a position of security into one of danger.
Except I’m stupid and I messed it up. “They were gonna figure out that we were down there. Maybe if I’d done something about the Suburban...” I should have thought to ditch it somewhere. “But it was parked right in the driveway...and I... I told that guy... Tork. I told him we were going to Dad’s.”
I take a deep breath to stop my voice from shaking. “The bunker can keep people out, but not indefinitely, and particularly not half the National Police. It was a matter of time before they figured out a way to open the hatch. And anyway, Mom said to...”
Charles pokes his head through the little window at the mention of Mom. “What did she say? Why didn’t you let me talk to Mom?”
I repeat what Mom told me on the phone.
The road has gotten rough from recent rain. MacKenna bounces up and down in her seat. “She wants us to find Dr. Doomsday? Why?”
And how?
“I told you. She thinks he has contacts with The Opposition.”
MacKenna frowns. “You’ve spent the last three months telling me that he doesn’t.”
Sigh. “I know what I said.”
We arrive at the base of Castle Rock and I start to relax a little. The plan, such that it is, appears to be working. The road is clear of police. I steer the truck south.
“Did Jay tell you anything? About what they think he did?” I ask.
Or maybe what’s going on with his computer.
MacKenna snorts. “You know he didn’t. He treats me like I’m made of glass.”
Our parents have this in common. Jay thinks MacKenna’s all messed up because of her mother’s death from cancer five years ago. Meanwhile, my mom thinks Dad’s drills have driven me off the deep end. They try hard to keep anything unpleasant away from us.
Jay once struggled to tell MacKenna that the yogurt shop around the corner had run out of chocolate sprinkles.
“Anyway, what could he have possibly done?” she goes on. “All he does is run background checks and train security guards. The most exciting thing that ever happened at the bank was when one teller stole someone’s ramen from the break room fridge. You know my dad. Becoming a citizen was the best day of his life. He’d wear his Silver Star with his pajamas if I let him. He’s about nothing but the flag, baseball and apple pie.”
She digs around in the pockets of her leggings and produces the phone I gave her.
“What are you doing?”
“Seeing if Toby called back.” She presses a few buttons on the screen. “He’s still not answering. Something’s wrong.”
I think she’s right. It’s way out of character for him not to return calls. But I find myself saying, “Maybe he just doesn’t recognize the phone number...or maybe... He’s nineteen and, as you keep reminding me, some kind of a genius. I’m sure he’s fine. I’m sure he’s still at school.”
My stomach lurches. I am not sure he’s fine.
MacKenna settles back into her seat. “We need to find him.”
“I’m not sure we can.”
“Not sure we can?” she repeats. “You think we can find Dr. Doomsday—a man with a background in counterintelligence, who can build a phone from a coconut and a cymbal-banging monkey toy, who is deliberately hiding from us—but we can’t figure out a way to pick up my brother from college?”
I drum my fingers on the steering wheel. The tiny dash clock blinks and reads 10:14 a.m. “I think there’s a good chance that we’ll be caught. They’ll expect us to go there.”
“They? Who’s ‘they’? You think they will go after Toby?”
I glance at the yellow duffel bag resting at MacKenna’s feet. “No. Mom says they’re looking for us. That they might want to detain us, and they’ll be expecting us to do something...well...stupid.”
“Why do they want us?”
“I don’t know. Mom didn’t explain it all to me. But they do. You saw them. There were probably a hundred cops back at the house. They weren’t coming to say hi.”
Oh, and also, we have the laptop that triggered the explosions at the banks.
Charles leans in. “We’re supposed to stay together.”
“I know! But we don’t know what’s happening out there.”
“Exactly!” MacKenna whirls around, and her ponytail smacks her in the face. “Okay. Sure. If that’s how it’s gonna be, fine. We’re supposed to be a family. We’re all in this together. Until you are all safe in here—” she waves her hand at me and Charles “—and my brother is stuck out there.”
My dad would say to follow the drill. To get out of town. He’d tell me that going onto a densely populated college campus in the hopes of finding a single student is stupid bordering on suicidal.
But Dad is gone, and I’m not sure I want to be the kind of person who leaves my family to twist in the wind.
Anyway. Screw him.
I stop the car when the dirt road intersects with the highway. A few cars pass, but it’s normal traffic. Staring at the asphalt, I try to come up with a new plan.
I face MacKenna. “Okay. If we’re gonna do this, we’ll have to work together.”
“Okay,” she says.
“Keep trying to text Toby,” I say. “The challenge is going to be how to find him if we can’t get ahold of him. Campus is huge, and we need to get in and out as fast as possible.”
“Any ideas?”
“Well. I could track Toby’s phone. Assuming it’s turned on, we could get a pretty accurate read of his location. At the very least, we could determine when he last used the phone and where he was when he used it.”
MacKenna nods. “You think that will work?”
I knew it would. I already had the scripts all set up. I just needed to get into Dad’s server to deploy them.
Turning on to the highway, I drive in the direction of the university. “We need a quiet place to work. And network access.”
It’s a risk, but I decide the best thing is to go to Dad’s office in the Computing Commons building. Technically speaking, Dad was on sabbatical, but he still kept an office on campus.
On one hand, it might occur to someone to watch it. On the other, I’m familiar with the parking lot and the area.
We make the turn from McCallister into the little lot behind Dad’s building. I stop the car in the shadow behind one of the building’s dumpsters.
“And we are...?” MacKenna asks, pausing her efforts to do something about the horrible static coming through the truck’s hollow speakers.
“Finding an out-of-the-way place to park. So we can find the car later, and so no one messes with it while we’re gone.” I roll up my window and reach over to open the glove compartment. Standard operating procedure for Dad would be to keep a bunch of different parking passes in here to prevent the car from attracting special notice. Sure enough, there’s a manila envelope with a bunch of stickers and placards inside. I grab the university permit one and put it in the front window of the truck. There’s also a lone stick of beef jerky that I force my brother to eat.
MacKenna rolls up her window too. “Well, I’ll say this for your dad, Dr. Doomsday really does think of everything.”
“You have no idea,” Charles mutters from the back. He wriggles through the window and into the space between me and MacKenna.
I don’t know why, maybe out of habit, but I pull down the visor to check myself in the mirror. The prehistoric vehicle doesn’t have vanity mirrors, so I slide a bit toward the center. I can see myself in the rearview. My bangs are stuck on my forehead again. I’m not sure I even combed my hair after my shower.
“Oh. For God’s sake. What are you doing? You’re fixing your hair? What the actual hell? We. Need. To. Find. My. Brother.”
I jump as MacKenna slams her door. I know I have to pull myself together. Reaching into one of the inside pockets of my jacket, I check to make sure I’ve got my mini tool kit. We’ll need to pick the lock to Dad’s door. I grab the yellow bag.
My hand warms with guilt as I wrap my fingers around the handle.
But I don’t have a choice.
Jay’s laptop is the only computer I’ve got.
MacKenna takes Charles’s hand and pulls him close to her.
We make our way out of the parking lot and toward the tall, redbrick building, passing several groups of students lounging near the fountain in the courtyard. There’s chatter I can’t quite make out, mumbling, the occasional burst of laughter.
Inside the CC, it’s really crowded. I’ve been here on a weekend before, and there’s usually only a couple teaching assistants stuck grading papers hanging around. Today, an odd mixture of people fill the halls. Students carrying blue protest signs. Old guys with their heads down, checking their phones.
Two security guards in blue uniforms.
Breathe.
Stay calm.
Before the security guards see us, I tug us into the stairwell.
“Dad’s office is on the third floor.”
MacKenna’s eyes are wide. She nods and we take the stairs.
We arrive on the third floor, all of us out of breath. Charles opens the door to a hallway, and it’s more like I expected. Quiet and mostly deserted.
It smells like someone has been through here recently with a plate of cupcakes.
A copy machine clicks and hums on the opposite end of the hall.
I lead us through a series of turns. Dad’s office is on the windowless side of the building, the side away from the attractive courtyard, down a narrow subhall that contains three tiny workrooms.
I stop in front of the door labeled Dr. Maxwell Marshall, Data Architecture.
The locks in the building are old and crappy and mostly meant to deter students who might want to cheat on their papers. I spent fourteen hours one Sunday with my dad, who wouldn’t let us get up from the kitchen table until I could pick most locks in less than thirty seconds. I pull the little tool kit from my pocket and hand it to Charles. He’s done this a hundred times too, so without any discussion he passes me the tension wrench.
“You two must be really fun at parties,” MacKenna mutters.
I insert it into the bottom of the keyhole and hold my hand out for the pick. I fiddle around for a few seconds, and we’re in. Charles locks the door behind us.
Dad’s office is dusted and deserted. There’s a pen jar on one corner of a large wooden desk and a bookcase on the far wall with a bunch of computer science reference manuals. Dad’s got a whole shelf of Pascal.
I take a seat behind the desk, open the yellow bag, rifle through the books and socks and dig the computer out of the concealed compartment at the bottom. The instant I have it set up on the desk, MacKenna and Charles move to stand behind me.
They lean over me while I work.
“Not helping, you guys.”
“If this were your brother, you’d be sitting on my lap,” she says.
I grab the computer and turn it so the screen faces away from them. It is annoying having someone look over my shoulder. MacKenna resigns herself to sitting in one of Dad’s guest chairs.
I make a few clicks to access the university’s Wi-Fi network.
My pulse quickens. Accessing the network starts the clock. This laptop has a unique MAC address that I don’t have the time or tools to try to conceal or spoof. If Tork really does have a partial log of the server activity of one of the banks, he’ll have this MAC address too.
And he’ll be watching for it.
We’ve got five minutes.
Maybe ten if we’re lucky.
And I am a jinx.
I log in to Dad’s server, open a console window and start the script running. Dad insisted that I write the basic code as part of one of our drills.
I just hope that MacKenna and Toby don’t get pissed that the app labeled AZ Weather on their phones actually grabs and sideloads GPS coordinates and sends them to Dad’s server.
I tap a few keys and wait.
A chat window pops open.
Terminus: Where the hell have you been?
Me: In the bunker.
Terminus: This stuff is all over the news.
Me: I know.
I hesitate for a second. But I might as well ask.
Me: I need to find my dad. Do you have any ideas?
