Juniper carried a sheet from the bedroom and laid it over Hannah’s body. Lela stared at the shroud until he rested a hand on her shoulder, and then she folded into him and let him wrap her into a tight hug.
Derek tapped the phone against his chin. Then he went to a shelf and pulled a laptop off it and booted it up. He opened a TOR browser and accessed the Dark Net and tried to recall their previous path. “The trouble is, these websites are all named by a scramble of letters and numbers. It’s difficult to remember the way.”
He worked his way through several websites before tapping 666 into the opening of the URL and saying, “I think this is it, but . . .” He swiveled the screen for them all to see. It was black except for a blinking white cursor in the top left corner, as though the script was waiting to be written.
“We’re cut off,” he told them. “If she’s in there, she’s in there alone. I can’t do anything from here.”
“From here,” Lela said. “But there’s another way?”
Derek shrugged and Josh said, “The IP address. If that’s what it actually is.”
Derek’s fingers punched the keyboard, swiped the touchpad. Another few minutes of digging and he confirmed the IP was local. “And I’m pretty certain I know the source. There are only two Dark Net hosts in Portland, and one of them went offline Halloween night.”
“That was Babs,” Juniper said. “A local crime boss. He was hosting servers out of his club, The Oubliette, that got knocked out when . . .” Here his eyes dropped to the shrouded figure on the floor. “So where can we find the other?”
A few blocks away, Derek said. In the Pearl. At the high-rise apartment of one of his frequent customers, Cheston. “Which means Hannah’s hiding somewhere in the forest of his blade system.”
This would be their plan then. Lela would go to Cheston’s apartment and retrieve her niece, while Josh and Juniper shut down the databases all across the metro. “Or?” Lela said.
“Or?” Derek said. “Or we die. Or Portland falls into a permanent darkness. Forget or. There is no or.”
Chapter 29
THE DOOR TO THE APARTMENT building is shattered, and Lela’s shoes crunch through the glass. Two bodies lie in the lobby, their arms around each other. Here is an overturned ficus tree, a messy pile of mail. Lela hears a ding, followed by the rattling shudder of elevator doors. She almost runs back into the street but instead dives behind the doorman’s desk. She holds her breath and tightens the grip around the pistol. She waits for the sound of footsteps that never comes. Another ding sounds, and the doors once again shudder in their tracks. A minute passes before she investigates. She turns the corner to find a third body lying with one leg outstretched and the jaws of the elevator closing repeatedly around it.
She takes the stairs. Her footsteps make a spiraling echo. She pauses at every landing, waiting for the noise to die down so that she can confirm she is alone. On the top floor, she finds the hallway empty. A TV blares behind one door. A stain seeps from beneath another, and she steps around the damp half-circle. And then she arrives at his apartment—1408—the door already open a crack, a red light leaking from it. She supposes she should rush inside, in case anyone lies in wait. That is her standard. To rush. Her sister often called her out on it, saying she hurried everywhere, like a kid in the cereal aisle. But right now she seems capable only of slowness. Hesitation. One inch at a time, one foot in front of the other. Any sudden movement makes her feel like she’s untethered from her body and waiting for it to catch up. So she gives the door a push and reforms her two-handed grip on the pistol and waits for something to come charging toward her.
The door swings and softly thuds the wall. The living room and kitchen are visible from here. The walls swim with a rippling light that emanates from another open doorway—an office or bedroom. The light is the color of blood. The color of an emergency. The color of a stop sign. A color that tells her to turn back.
She steps inside. Her pistol follows her eyes. She thinks about hitting the light switch, but the floor-to-ceiling windows already make her feel too exposed. There is a leather couch and a coffee table with a tablet and a laptop on it. On the wall is a mounted big screen surrounded by game consoles and speakers big enough to compete with a concert hall. It’s tidy. Empty of any decoration. Functional but devoid of personality.
She moves toward the light and finds what she is looking for, an office dominated by a multi-screened computer terminal. It is blindingly red, streaming code. The beating source of it all. Even out of the corner of her eye, she feels sickened, dizzy.
?
There are hundreds of cell towers in Oregon, many of them in Portland, all with fiber cables trenched between them and the data centers. Each has three faces—alpha, beta, and gamma—that can handle around eight hundred transmissions. Too many people try to make a call, too many people try to stream a YouTube video, then everything slugs to a crawl. Or you get booted off, at which time your phone will relay to another tower, maybe with a rival company. If you’ve ever glanced at your phone at a concert or a football game, and wondered why—in the middle of a city—your signal is spotty, it’s because the towers can only accommodate so many.
When Derek sent Juniper and Josh off to bomb the data centers, he didn’t want them to bring down Internet access. He wanted to knock out every data center but one. In doing so they would push every signal-seeking device onto the same conduit—the biggest in the area, the only one with enough bandwidth to handle the overflow—Paradise Wireless.
Its towers bristle from hilltops and its fiber cables tentacle the ground, and every screen, every wireless and cable transmission will shuttle through its port. So long as what Hannah says is true, so long as she can stop this, then they need only tap her into the master cabinet at the Paradise data center, and she’ll be able to stream into any connected device.
“How the fuck do we do that?” Lela said.
“We’ll have to go on-site. Their firewall is unbreachable.” Even now he couldn’t stop his mouth from cocking into a smile. “I’ve tried.”
“That doesn’t sound easy.”
“It won’t be.”
“Given what’s happening outside, that sounds like the hardest thing in world history. We don’t even have Hannah.”
“We’ll need to go on-site to retrieve her as well. At Cheston’s apartment.”
Lela said, “How did you even come up with this plan?”
His superior tone would be horribly obnoxious in any other circumstance, but what they needed now was confidence and he was soaked in it.
An embattled race had been taking place on the digital frontier for some time, and the United States, China, and Russia were the main players. Engaged in secret stealing. Sabotage. Derek knew digital warfare would break out at some point; he was surprised now only by the supernatural powers of the aggressor. “The next world war began a long time ago,” he said. “Welcome to the front lines.”