On Friday, on his way to school, Sam Wilson brought the United States of America to its knees.
He didn’t mean to. He was actually just trying to score a new computer and some other cool stuff, and in any case the words “to its knees” were the New York Times’ not his. (And way over the top in Sam’s view.) Not as bad though as the Washington Post. Their headline writers must have been on a coffee binge because they screamed
National Disaster
in size-40 type when their presses finally came back online.
Anyway it was only for a few days, and it really wasn’t a disaster at all. At least not compared to what was still to come.
A juddering roar reverberated off high-rise buildings and Sam glanced up as the dark shadow of a police Black Hawk slid across the street. His breath caught in his chest for a moment as if all the oxygen in the street had suddenly disappeared, but the chopper didn’t slow; it was just a routine patrol. It weaved smoothly between the monoliths of uptown Manhattan, a cop with a long rifle spotlighted in the open doorway by a brilliant orange burst of early morning sun.
He tried to remember a time when armed police in helicopters hadn’t patrolled the city, but couldn’t. It seemed that it had always been that way. At least since Vegas.
Grey clouds were seeping a dreary, misty drizzle from high over the city, but low on the horizon there was a long thin gap into which the sun had risen, teasing New York with a short-lived promise of a sunny day.
Sam cut down 44th Street and turned right at 7th Avenue to avoid beggars’ row along Broadway. He took 42nd to Times Square where the tall video screens flickered intermittently or were silent and dark. The M&M’s screen still worked although there were several blank spots that were said to be bullet holes.
Forty-second Street Station was crowded – jostling, bustling, shortness-of-breath crowded – at this time of the morning, but he was used to that and the subway was still the fastest and safest way to get around Manhattan.
He got out at Franklin Street Station and took Varick Street down to West Broadway. He quickened his step as he passed Gamer Alley. His nose wrinkled involuntarily at some of the odours that hung around the entrance.
Two dogs were fighting on the corner of Thomas and West Broadway but stopped as he approached. He slowed, not comfortable with the narrowing of their eyes or the jelly-strings of drool dripping from their fangs.
One took a step towards him, a low growl in its throat. The other followed, lips drawing back from its teeth.
Sam took a step backwards. The dogs moved closer, haunches high, stalking him. He stumbled backwards a few more steps. A police humvee cruised past and he half-turned towards it, hoping that the cops would stop and intervene, but they either didn’t see, or didn’t care.
The entrance to Gamer Alley appeared to his right. As the dogs spread out to cut off his escape, he turned and strode into the smoky unease of the alleyway.
He glanced behind but the dogs had not followed.
The walls of the alley were high and the street was narrow, a deep saw-cut across a city block. None of the dawn glow penetrated, just a tired dullness that washed through the clouds and was swallowed up by the steam and smoke from the food stalls. Gaudy fluorescent signs appeared indistinctly through the haze, promising the latest in video-gaming technology. The games they promoted were innocuous but everyone, especially the cops, knew that once inside, the full range of games, including all the illegal ones, were freely available.
People drifted past. Both men and women with the vacant stares and twitching hands of long-term game addicts.
Sam thrust his hands into his jacket pockets, hunched his shoulders and moved deeper into Gamer Alley.
A woman in her twenties, fashion-model-beautiful, sat on a blue office chair next to an overflowing dumpster. Her hair was plastered to her scalp by the rain, and droplets of water formed on the end of her nose before breaking away in a rhythmical pattern. She did nothing. She said nothing. She just sat, watching Sam as he made his way down the alley towards her. A game addict, for sure.
As he neared, the chair swivelled slightly and although her head and neck did not move, her eyes remained fixed on him.
He passed her, the chair swivelling more, her whole body turning with it to stay focused on him, her face expressionless.
His shoulders crawled as he left her behind, as if the strange inactivity might suddenly explode into mindless violence.
Ten yards past, he glanced back. She stared at him, unmoving.
“Want to buy a dog?”
The man in a shabby grey overcoat was right in front of him and he had to stop abruptly to avoid a collision.
“I, er …”
“Want to buy a dog?”
The dog in question was in the man’s arms. A mangy cross about the size of a small poodle, but of no detectable breed.
“He’s a good boy,” the man said, thrusting the dog forwards. The dog snarled and snapped at Sam, missing his arm by a fraction of an inch.
“No, I …”
“Hardly ever bites,” the man said.
“No.”
Sam took a wide step around the man as the dog’s teeth snapped together again in midair.
The end of the alley neared.
To his right, a door opened on a second-storey fire-escape. A man in his fifties burst out of the building dressed only in Mickey Mouse boxer shorts with a Hawaiian lei around his neck. He was carrying a coffee machine. He leaped down the metal steps three at a time, and disappeared across the street and around the corner of a building just as two policemen, in black tactical gear, burst out of the same door, hard on his heels.
Sam escaped onto Church Street with a slight sigh of relief and a relaxing of his nostrils. His cell rang, right on cue, as he turned into Thomas Street and he tapped his bluetooth earpiece into his ear.
“Hi, Mom,” he said.
“What kept you?” Fargas asked on the other end of the line, his mouth full of something.
Sam looked up at the building opposite. He caught a glimpse of Fargas behind a window on the second floor, the two black circles of a pair of powerful binoculars jutting out from his long mop of unruly hair.
Sam made a discreet waving motion with his left hand.
There was a flash of white from the window that he took as a sign Fargas had waved back.
“Cut through Gamer Alley,” Sam said.
There was a short pause while Fargas digested that. “Quick hit on the way?”
“Just sightseeing,” Sam said. “What are you eating?”
It would be caramel corn. Fargas was the only person he knew who could eat caramel-coated popcorn for breakfast.
“Caramel corn,” Fargas said. “Want some? I’ll toss a couple of pieces out the window.”
“Suddenly not hungry,” Sam said. “Can’t think why.”
He walked casually past the Telecomerica building as if he had no interest in it whatsoever. He didn’t even glance at it.
“You sure this is possible?” Fargas sounded a little nervous.
“I’m sure it’s not,” Sam said. “Be no fun otherwise. They’ve got industrial-strength firewalls with a DMZ and a secondary defensive ring with ASA and IPSec. Impenetrable.”
“Then give it away, dude,” Fargas said. “I’m not going to jail for the sake of a hack.”
“Fargas,” Sam said, “you’re my brother and I love you but you gotta get your head out of your butt before you fart and suffocate yourself.”
“I’m not your brother and you don’t love me,” Fargas pointed out.
“You know you’re the one I’d turn gay for.” Sam grinned up at the window.
“I thought you liked Keisha,” Fargas said.
“I’d definitely turn gay for her,” Sam said. “If I was a chick. How is she?”
“Still not interested.”
“Her words or yours?”
“She’s a sophomore. You’re a senior. That’s just wrong. Should be illegal.”
“Have you asked her for me?” Sam asked.
“You can’t ask her yourself?”
“She’s a sophomore. She’s got to ask me.”
“Loser,” Fargas said.
Sam said, “Okay, here we go.”
The cafe was long, low and thin: a brick-lined tunnel reaching into the depths of the city block. The table Sam wanted was in use, but the smartly dressed businessman was just draining the last of his coffee so Sam loitered by the door for a moment, pretending to read the chalkboard breakfast menu until the man left.
He ordered a chai latte from the surly, mono-browed waitress and waited for it to arrive before opening his schoolbag. His bag of tricks. Dirty tricks.
His table was at the back of the cafe, deep in the heart of the building beside a large leafy pot plant with an interlaced trunk. The position had been carefully chosen.
Opening his schoolbag was both exciting and terrifying at once. It was crossing a line. It was the start of something, like strapping yourself into a roller-coaster. No, more like a Special Forces soldier going behind enemy lines, or a spy setting out on a dangerous mission that depended on skill, wits and fast reactions to stay alive.
He pulled out his laptop and from the front pocket of his bag he took a parabolic aerial, unfolding the wings and embedding it at the base of the pot plant.
“You in place?” Fargas asked in his ear.
“Yes, Mom,” Sam said, glancing around the cafe.
It was about three-quarters full: mostly dark-suited businessmen and women. The occasional arty, Greenwich Village type, slumming it with the suits.
A man in his twenties with a completely shaven head and a spider’s web tattoo crawling up the back of his neck was seated with a stern-looking matronly woman, possibly his mother, in a severe grey woollen dress. A small group of tourists at a table by the door were busy taking photos of each other with their cell phones and laughing.
He switched his gaze to his laptop and opened his wireless connection manager. A red light on the front panel flickered orange, then changed to green as it picked up signals from wireless networks nearby. Green like a traffic light. Green for go.
The panel on his laptop showed seventeen networks in all; the cafe’s own free network for patrons had the strongest signal. The others came from all around and above him, gigabytes of data flying through the air of the cafe. Personal, confidential, private data, broadcast by people with utter faith in the security of their wireless networks.
Nor was that faith totally unjustified. With intrusion detection and high-level encryption, it would take a very special person to hack into that data. An expert. A genius. A devil. All of the above, some would say.
Someone like Sam.
Sam ignored sixteen of the signals. There was only one that interested him: an indistinct signal from a wireless access point on the other side of the old brick wall next to him, probably quite close by, but the wall degraded the signal until it was as thin as a ghost.
The parabolic aerial he was aiming in that direction had a built-in signal booster. He turned it back and forth, gauging the angle where the signal was the strongest.
“How you going?” Fargas asked.
“No problems so far,” Sam murmured. “Wireless security is a contradiction in terms. Like ‘military intelligence’ or ‘jumbo shrimp’.”
“I like jumbo shrimp,” Fargas said.
Sam transmitted a generic disconnect signal, dropping the other station off the network. Lost and alone, it immediately began bleating, like some kitten mewling for its mother.
He intercepted the reconnect signal and broadcast the same signal from his laptop. Less than a second later he was part of the network.
“Anything happening?” Sam asked quietly.
“A few security guards in the foyer.”
“What are they doing?”
“Linedancing,” Fargas said.
Sam smiled. “Okay, let’s do it,” he said.
With another quick glance around at the other patrons, he reached out cool cyber hands into the network, into the digital world on the other side of the wall.