14 | LOCKDOWN
The phone woofed, startling him. Sam was lying on the emperor-sized bed in his suite. The television was on, and he had almost dozed off in front of a game show. No, not dozed off, just zoned out, his mind free-falling, weightless.
Getting to the hotel from the CDD building had been a surreal experience. They had finished their shift at three o’clock. A gray van had been waiting for them. A large man in a dark suit with a curly wire coming out of his ear drove the van, and his twin rode shotgun beside him.
The van drove out from the underground parking lot of the oddly shaped building that was his new workplace, across to the other side of the road, and down into the underground parking lot of the hotel.
He could have walked there faster.
Another of the curly-wired gentlemen was standing outside the elevators on his floor and nodded to him curtly when he stepped out.
Vienna got out on his floor also, but she turned left where he turned right.
“See you tomorrow,” Sam had said cheerfully, but other than a quick glance back over her shoulder, she had ignored him.
The phone woofed again, and Sam reached over to answer it, his brain slowly coming back online.
Jaggard had given him a cell phone, and, stuck in the hotel suite, Sam had played around with all the features on it. The phone had a variety of sounds, ranging from buzzes to birds to Mr. Spock from Star Trek saying, “It’s a call, Jim, but not as you know it.” Sam had chosen a barking dog, for no good reason.
“This is Sam,” he said cautiously.
“Sam, ya muppet,” Dodge boomed in his ear. “Feel like a swim? We’re going up to the pool.”
“I don’t have a bathing suit …,” Sam started to say, but Dodge had already hung up.
The pool was on the roof of the hotel, protected from the wind by a heavy glass wall that ran around three sides. The fourth side was a plain-faced concrete structure that offered shade to one end of the pool and housed the elevators and washrooms.
It looked more like a meandering curved pond than a swimming pool, surrounded by tall palm trees in wooden tubs. When Sam glanced in the pool, he was astonished to see dolphins swimming around, then realized that the bottom of the pool was actually a large video screen. From the surface, the dolphins seemed remarkably lifelike.
The low afternoon sun hit his face the moment he stepped out onto the roof, and he blinked a couple of times against the glare.
White wicker lounge chairs were arranged in small clusters around the edge of the pool, and it was in one of the clusters, near a barbecue trolley, that Sam found Dodge, Vienna, and Kiwi, lying in the sun, drinking soda. Dodge and Kiwi were shirtless, in board shorts, and Vienna wore a bikini top and shorts.
The bikini top was a green camouflage pattern with a brass center ring and straps that—
“Nice view?” Vienna asked, and Sam quickly averted his eyes.
“Sorry, I was just—”
“Yes, you were,” Vienna said.
“Grab a lounger,” Dodge said. “What kept you?”
“Didn’t have a bathing suit,” Sam replied. “Had to go buy one at the hotel gift shop.”
“Shouldn’t have bothered,” Dodge said immediately. “We’re all going skinny-dipping anyway.”
Sam looked at the others’ faces to see if Dodge was joking, but Kiwi’s face was expressionless, and Vienna’s held only a slight smirk that gave nothing away.
Dodge was surely just joking, Sam decided. Although they were the only ones there.
Sam slipped his shirt off as he clambered onto an empty lounge chair next to Dodge.
Dodge gesticulated in the air, a vague hand gesture, and a waiter in a white dinner jacket appeared from a small gazebo.
“What would you like, sir?” the waiter asked Sam.
“Just water, iced,” Sam said, and the waiter retreated, returning a moment later with a glass brimming with ice and topped with a lime slice.
Dodge raised his own glass. “To Sam’s first day,” he said with a big smile that crinkled the tattoo on his forehead.
“To another day of keeping the barbarians at bay,” Kiwi said.
Sam sipped at his water. “Do they ever get in?” he asked.
“Sometimes,” Dodge said. “Little stuff here and there. We stamp on it right quick.”
“Usually without too much damage and without Joe the Public ever getting wind of it,” Kiwi added.
“Usually?” Sam asked.
“Usually,” Dodge agreed. “There’s been only one serious breach in the last four or five years.”
“Really? What was that?” Sam asked.
There was a silence, and the leaves of the palm tree above them waved gently in a strengthening afternoon breeze. It was Vienna who finally answered the question.
“You, Sam.”
“Anyone for a swim?” Sam asked a little later, feeling that he had gone from medium-rare to well-done in a short space of time.
“You go,” Dodge said. “I’ll join you soon.”
That same smirk was back on Vienna’s face, and Sam wondered why.
Sam walked to the edge of the pool and tested the water with his toe. It was pleasantly cool, not stomach-tightening cold, and he bent his legs, ready to dive in.
In an instant, the playful dolphins disappeared, replaced by a swarm of writhing, circling sharks.
“Whoa!” Sam yelled, jumping back from the edge. The others howled with laughter. In his hand, Dodge held some kind of remote control.
Sam grinned and shook his head.
He tested the water again with his toe, and immediately the sharks converged, thrashing and writhing in a feeding frenzy, right where his toe was, their white underbellies flashing. A redness spread from the center of the pack, rippling through the pool.
He snatched his toe out again.
“What’s wrong with ya?” Kiwi yelled with a grin. “They’re not real.”
Sam looked again at the pool and decided to postpone his swim anyway. Real or not, it no longer seemed like a pleasant experience.
Vienna made a clucking sound like a chicken as he walked back to the lounge chair. Dodge held up the remote device.
“Reprogrammed the hotel pool system,” he said, laughing.
“Then you go swim in it,” Sam said.
“Right you are,” Dodge said, and jumped up, heading toward the pool.
“I thought you were going skinny-dipping,” Sam called after him.
“Right you are!” Dodge said again, stripping off his board shorts and letting them lie where they fell.
He jogged naked toward the pool, then veered off to the left, bounded onto a lounge chair that was pushed up against the glass wall, and sprang onto the top of the wall.
“Dodge!” Sam cried out, suddenly terrified. On the other side of that wall was a twenty-story drop. He glanced around at the others, but they seemed calm and relaxed.
“Done this lots of times,” Dodge said, balancing, stark naked, on the wall. The glass was topped with a stainless-steel rail, Sam saw now, at least six inches wide. Even so, Dodge’s perch seemed precarious, considering the drop that was on the other side.
“It’s a bit gusty up here,” Dodge said, waving his arms about for balance.
“Dodge?” Sam said. “Dodge!”
“Whoooaaa,” Dodge yelled, his arms now flailing as he fought for balance on the narrow top edge of the wall. His foot slipped. One moment he was vertical; the next he was on one leg, leaning backward out over the drop, far too far. Sam jumped up, rushing toward him but knowing with utter horror that he could never make it in time.
Then, with a twist of his body, Dodge executed a perfect somersault into the pool, landing right in the middle of the shark feeding frenzy.
He came up for air and took a bow in the water.
Sam looked around at the others in shock.
“He does that to all the eggs,” Kiwi said, and then explained, “Probationers. One day he’s going to kill himself.”
“Why don’t you stop him?” Sam asked, his heart pounding.
“If he dies, I get promoted to point,” Kiwi said. “In fact, one day I might just push him off the edge myself.”
Sam opened his mouth to say something, then saw Kiwi’s grin and laughed. “You’re all mad.”
“Goes with the job,” Vienna said.
Two girls in bikinis emerged from the elevators and made their way to a couple of lounge chairs on the far side of the pool. One was about his age and the other slightly older. They appeared to be sisters with matching blond hair.
Sam looked back at Dodge, who was still in the pool.
“Now what are you going to do?” he said.
“Get out,” Dodge said, and did so.
He walked straight past the two girls as if it was perfectly natural, picked up his board shorts, and pulled them on before flopping back down on his lounge chair.
The two girls stretched out on their lounge chairs, and the younger one looked at them and smiled.
“She just smiled at you, mate,” Dodge said. “Go on over and say hello.”
“I don’t think it was me she was looking at,” Sam said.
“Go on,” Dodge said.
Sam just laughed and casually glanced over toward the younger girl, trying not to make it obvious that he was looking.
“So how come we all live in this fancy hotel, anyway?” he asked.
“We don’t live here,” Dodge said. “You’re here ’cause you’re on probation, and we just moved in for a few weeks ’cause of the threat level.”
“I have an apartment over in Milpitas,” Kiwi said.
“They keep us close at hand in a crisis ’cause it’s quicker, and also so they can protect us better,” Dodge added.
“Protect us?” Sam asked.
“If the bad guys got hold of you, it could compromise the whole CDD,” Kiwi said.
Sam nodded. John Jaggard had said something similar that morning.
“So how does this all work?” Sam asked. “CDD I mean. You’re from New Zealand, Dodge is English, and that Gummi Bear guy has got some kind of accent too. How’d you all end up working for the U.S. government?”
“Ain’t no national borders on the Internet,” Dodge answered for him. “Best of the best. From around the world. That’s official CDD policy. They don’t care where you come from as long as they think they can trust you.”
“Gummi’s from Zimbabwe,” Kiwi added.
“And that whole story about robbing a bank in Nebraska. You made that up?” Sam asked.
Kiwi shook his head. “That’s how they got me.” He laughed. “Next thing I knew, I was being invited to dinner at the White House.”
“Yeah.” Sam nodded. “How about you, Dodge?”
“They grew him in a tank,” Vienna muttered, but there was a smile in her eye.
“I was born in Los Angeles,” Dodge said, and seeing Sam’s questioning look, added, “But I mainly grew up in London.”
“So how’d they catch you?”
Dodge winked and tapped the side of his nose. “More than my life’s worth to tell you, Sonny Jim.”
Sam looked at Kiwi, who shook his head. “I’ve been trying to get it out of him since I’ve been here.”
Sam shrugged. “And you, Vienna?”
There was an uncomfortable silence, and then she dismissed him with a glance and shut her eyes, turning her face to the sun.
Kiwi gave Sam a small shake of the head. Don’t bother asking. “How did you get into hacking?” he asked.
“Well …” Sam hesitated. “When I was younger, we couldn’t really afford a computer, but I got a part-time job at a computer company, helping out in the repair section. We’d often get computers in with some kind of fault that meant they had to be replaced. But usually most of the computer was okay. So I’d salvage any parts that were worth keeping before chucking the rest in a Dumpster.
“Eventually I got enough spare parts to build an entire computer at home. I hot-wired the neighbor’s broadband connection to get Internet access, and it kind of all grew from there.”
“How old were you?” Dodge asked. “When you did all this?”
“Twelve,” Sam said.
There was a stunned silence from the others, which Vienna broke by saying, “Had to happen, Dodge. We finally found a bigger geek than you.”
“So what’s with the doorbell thing? At the White House,” Sam asked.
“We just do that to freak people out.” Dodge grinned.
“It works,” Sam said.
“Now go on over and introduce yourself to Miss Congeniality before she starts to think you’re a numb-nuts,” Dodge said.
“Yeah, yeah, soon,” Sam said, not moving. “Tell me more. Is there anywhere we can’t go? Anywhere off-limits?”
“Not much. Some financial stuff. CIA, of course. Some classified government files,” Dodge said, rolling over onto his stomach and resting his head on his hands.
“Where they keep the answers to all the big questions,” Kiwi said.
“JFK, Roswell, Vegas, stuff like that,” Dodge said.
Sam sat up on the lounge chair and looked over with sudden interest. The assassination of JFK last century was still a cause for speculation and conspiracy theory, even now; the purported alien-spaceship crash at Roswell was regarded as a joke by some and as gospel by others; while Vegas was often described as the world’s biggest unsolved murder.
“Serious?” Sam said. “And you can’t get in?”
“I said we weren’t allowed to. I didn’t say we weren’t capable,” Dodge said.
“Leave it alone, Dodge,” Vienna said. “He’s an egg.”
Dodge leaned toward Sam and spoke in a low voice. “Do you really want to know who actually killed JFK?”
“Yeah, of course. Doesn’t everyone?”
“Not who you’d think,” Dodge said enigmatically.
Sam began, “But—”
“Whatever you’ve read, whatever you’ve imagined, you’re not even close,” Dodge cut him off. “Want to know the truth about Roswell?”
“Hell, yeah!”
“Never happened. No spaceship, no dead aliens, nothing. It was a cover-up, all right, but not for a crashed UFO. That was just the diversion, to draw attention away from what was really going on, which is even harder to believe.”
“What—”
“And Vegas …”
It was strange, the names that were given to major tragedies, Sam thought. The World Trade Center disaster was always known by the date, 9/11, while the explosion three years earlier that had left a radioactive scar on the desert where Las Vegas used to be was known simply as Vegas.
“You want to know who set off that warhead and turned the place into a nuclear crap-hole?” Dodge asked.
“Yeah.”
“So do they, matey. So do they.”
Later, upstairs in his room, Sam tried to watch TV, but no shows held his interest. He worried about the new job and how he would cope. He worried about his mom and what she was thinking. He worried whether he was worrying too much and would not be able to sleep.
Eventually, about eleven-thirty, he flicked off the lights and, despite his worries, fell almost immediately to sleep.
After a while he dreamed, and in his dream he was a knight in strange, electronic armor that fizzled and crackled with electrons, emitting a ghostly greenish glow. Slimy mud dragons with red LED eyes were scaling the walls of the castle around him, jagged daggers held in their teeth. Desperately, he looked around for Dodge for help; there were just too many of them. But he was on his own.
The first of the creatures was almost upon him, the dagger in its strange, doglike jaws.
Sam prepared for battle as the creature opened its mouth, dropping the dagger, and began to bark.
It was a dog, not a dragon; why had he not realized that before? He raised his sword and swung at the creature, which dissolved in a cloud of digital particles.
The barking persisted, though, and the castle was gone, along with the armor and the mud creatures.
The glowing clock on the nightstand said 2:53 a.m.
And the phone was woofing at him again.