Besides Paradise Wireless, there are four other major providers in Portland. Juniper is headed first to a data center in Tigard, a suburb of strip malls and multiplex theaters and tightly packed housing developments. This data center, like all data centers, is not advertised online and cannot be found in the phone book. The buildings are not physically marked with signage. You might drive past one every day. You might live or work nearby and not know any better. Except for the utility vans and trucks—often decaled with the company’s name—that park in the lots, these are buildings that hope for anonymity.
Because they are critical arteries of digital information. People tend to think about the Internet in a blindly amorphous, almost religious way. There is an all-knowing repository known as the cloud that everyone and everything is a part of, but no one can tell you where it is. Some invisible communication is going on all around us, part of the ether. Towers are erected, steepled on hillsides, where voices are funneled like prayers and hymns.
In fact, the Internet would not exist if not for the fiber cables that vein the ground beneath our streets, through our sewers. There are around eighty major network junctions—known as IXPs, for Internet exchange points—throughout the country. These are the freeways that feed the domestic traffic as well as the international data that comes from undersea cables. They are nakedly unprotected. As are the fiber cables that branch off them and come together—at pinch points, spaghetti junctions—within the data centers. The term wireless couldn’t be more misleading.
Every now and then, there will be a data outage due to a fiber cut. During which time you cannot text, cannot email, cannot call your sister in Omaha to wish her a happy birthday or even your local 911 dispatcher to report an emergency, cannot use a credit card or ATM, cannot watch Netflix or ask Google a question or turn on your security system or access hospital records or any of the other hundreds of conveniences we take for granted, that make us safe and happy, that make society hum.
All it takes is an earthquake—the slight shifting of stone—or a construction project—the metal bite of a payloader’s scoop—and the cables are clipped and everything goes dark. Or someone could simply hoist a manhole cover, climb below the street, and use a knife or a pair of wire cutters to slow or cease all local Internet traffic. The security at the data centers is minimal—sometimes a single guard in the lobby, sometimes no one at all—but even if they hired out a small army, the cables that reach beyond it would remain completely unguarded. We worry about guns and we worry about bombs, but one of the greatest threats of this time is a mere knife jab to the physical cabling that is the circulatory system of the country.
At the entrance to the Tigard data center, there is a rolling gate—woven with chain-link—that Juniper does not slow down for. The Ram lives up to its name, crashing through with a splash of sparks and a grating screech as it carries the gate with it. He comes to a rocking stop after twenty yards, and the gate releases from the grille and keeps going another five.
The building before him couldn’t be more nondescript: one-story, brick, maybe four thousand square feet, with two windows bordering the entrance. You’d think they’d be bigger, but even as traffic increases, the need for circuit-and-node real estate grows smaller. Technology shrinks even as it opens up new worlds. To serve the entire state of Oregon only requires around two hundred thousand gigs of data a day. In the building the lights are off, but in the parking lot a vapor lamp burns, casting its glow on three utility vans parked there.
He kills the engine, climbs out, and hoists from the cab the cardboard box packed with C-4 demolition charges. The puttied bricks give off the smell of motor oil and Band-Aids. It hurts to move. To turn the steering wheel, to depress the gas and brake, to open and close the door, to carry the box, which weighs over fifty pounds. He walks as carefully as he can, no sudden movements, but still he can feel the stitches straining, tearing.
He’s not worried about dropping the box or fumbling the bricks—he does both as he moves around the perimeter of the building, setting them in place—because C-4 is stable and resilient enough that it will only blow when exposed to extreme heat and shock wave. This will come from the detonators he’s inserted in each of them. He and Sarin had cooked and molded the C-4 themselves to take down a neo-Nazi militia compound—way up in the Cascades—headed by a demon who was readying a series of attacks on mosques and synagogues throughout the Northwest, hoping to start a holy war. Juniper kept the leftovers in case they came in handy.
In each block he stabs a blasting cap, and from this he runs a detonating cord capped at each end with a booster. There might have been a time when detonating a building would jag his heart with excitement, fill him with some boyish anticipation. No longer. There was too much lost already, and he goes about his business with a joyless determination.
He hides behind his truck for the detonation. The air pulses yellow, orange, red, and back again. The sound is thunderous, a forceful wind that pops his ears and gives way to a mosquito whine that lingers. Bricks rain down and clunk the truck and scatter across the parking lot. When he stands, with some difficulty, he sees the fiery, cratered remains of the building. Black smoke roils from it.
He unclips the walkie-talkie. “One down,” he says, and Josh says, “Make that two.”
Josh was in Beaverton, at another data center. Juniper wasn’t sure he should send the kid off on his own, but in the interest of time, they didn’t have any choice. Lela had even risen from her daze to say that Josh might look like a loser—with his pleated khakis and his pimple-rashed cheeks—but the intern was all right. And now Josh has pulled through. Neither of them has run into any trouble, so maybe things will turn out all right after all.
It is then—when Juniper says, “Nice work,” and limps toward the driver’s door of the Ram—that he spots the hound. It wanders out of the night, the hard pads of its paws clopping on the wet pavement like hooves. It pauses only for a moment, beneath the vapor lamp in the parking lot, which finds a reflection in the milky cast of its eyes.
He holsters the walkie-talkie. He reaches into his pocket and fumbles for his key. He cringes when he runs—as best as he can manage, more of a loping hobble—to the door and yanks it open and climbs inside and cranks the key. By this time the hound has started after him. It lowers its head and tucks its tail. Its body tightens and unclenches when it speeds forward, whippet-fast. It hurls itself against the door powerfully enough to rock the vehicle. Against the window its claws scrabble and its jaws leave a rime of saliva.