Chapter 29
June
After locking the door and checking out Stella’s house, the first thing June did was fire up her laptop in the dining nook.
She didn’t have Stella’s Wi-Fi password, but she didn’t need it.
Because her work was often sensitive—and because, years ago, she’d been hacked at a Starbucks, which for a tech journalist was fucking embarrassing—she’d started using a mobile hot spot, which allowed her to connect securely to the internet from any place with a cell connection.
She’d already texted with Lewis’s friend Robert, and knew that he was up late, working.
June had plenty of computer skills, but Robert’s knowledge was light-years ahead of hers.
She let him know she was online, and he sent her a permission box to allow him to access her system remotely.
She clicked yes. If you can’t trust a professional white-hat intrusion specialist to peek inside your shit, who can you trust?
Waiting for his software to sync, she peeled open the tinfoil and removed the burner Peter had taken from the killer’s Toyota.
Rewrapping Ellie’s phone, she shook her head, thinking again what a bad idea it was to take evidence from a murder scene.
She’d have been pissed at Peter for doing it, but she knew he hadn’t done it lightly.
Mostly it was a serious indication of how much losing KT was messing with his head.
June got that. Losing a good friend was messing with her, too.
She hoped the phone would give up some secrets that Captain Durant wouldn’t have otherwise shared.
Or—and she knew she was rationalizing here—maybe Durant’s people wouldn’t even have bothered with it.
When you’ve already decided what happened, why continue to actually investigate?
Following Robert’s instructions, she plugged the burner into her laptop with a spare cable from her bag, so he could use his pro-grade tools to unlock it from his hacker lair.
“Ready,” she texted. “How long do you think this will take?”
“A few hours, tops,” he replied. “These cheap phones don’t have strong security. You’re lucky it’s not an iPhone. Those are a lot harder.”
She sent him a few kiss emojis along with a reminder to send her a bill, then pulled out the bundle of old maps Peter had taken from Reed’s apartment, similar to the bundle he’d found in the Toyota’s glove box.
Pulling off the rubber bands, she flipped through the collection.
He had one for every state except Alaska and Hawaii.
Very strange. She unfolded the top map, which was for Washington state.
It was covered with markings. They were like hieroglyphics or alien pictograms, made with ultra-fine-tipped pens in multiple colors.
Dense in places and sparse in others, each dense section was linked to others by ruler-straight lines.
Like an org chart or genealogical diagram, only far more complex.
Adding to the mystery was a column of numbers written down the side of the map in the same spidery hand. Each row was fourteen digits long with no breaks. Too many digits to be telephone numbers. Maybe account numbers? Or email addresses? There were ten sets, each unique.
She opened the next map, Oregon. It had a similar set of hieroglyphics and column of numbers. California was the same. And Arizona. And Nevada. What any of this meant, she couldn’t even begin to guess.
Although maybe there was no sense to be made.
Maybe the diagrams were just the product of Reed’s tangled mind, referencing some abstract internal structure that only he could see.
He sure had put a lot of work into it, though.
She’d share the diagrams with Peter and Lewis. Maybe they could figure it out.
She folded up the maps, put the rubber bands back on, and set them aside. Moving on to the next task, she pulled out her tablet and opened a voice transcription app, one of many recent technologies made possible because of a leap forward in artificial intelligence.
As AI got better and better, all kinds of companies were taking advantage of the tech to make more capable software.
June didn’t do much reporting on AI, but she kept up on new advances.
It was a little freaky, she thought, for the present day to start catching up to science fiction.
Some obvious benefits, but oh so many possible disaster scenarios.
June wasn’t particularly worried about a Terminator moment, where the machines revolted, made robots that looked like Arnold Schwarzenegger, and tried to wipe out humanity.
She was more worried about the number of jobs that could be lost over a relatively short span of time and what effect that might have on society.
If AI advanced as quickly as the experts expected, it would be like NAFTA on steroids, and it would cut across every sector of the economy.
Every AI company was racing for the brass ring, the mother of all killer apps and the enormous fortunes it would generate.
Nobody seemed to be thinking much about the long-term ramifications.
Even if one company did decide to slow down, twenty more would leap forward.
All the journalists in the world wouldn’t change that.
There was simply too much money involved.
Government oversight had been neutered by hundreds of millions in campaign contributions.
Even without it, regulation would never be able to keep up with the rate of change.
The genie was officially out of the bottle.
Sighing, she found the digital audio she’d made from the Messenger cassette and uploaded it to the transcription app.
It immediately began to spit out text. She copied and pasted into a document and then, because poor sound quality tended to amplify mistakes, began to work her way through it, checking for errors.
There were remarkably few. They must have updated the app again, she thought. Before long, they would be able to transcribe your thoughts. No joke, there were actual companies working on that, with some early success.
She tried to be hopeful about all this rapid technological evolution. She wasn’t always successful. And June was good at technology. She actually liked it.
What if you were someone who didn’t like it?
What if you were truly afraid of what the future might bring?
You’d be someone like the Messenger.
—
She went through the cassette tape transcript, looking for key words and phrases.
The Dark Time. The Industrial Machine. The Messenger.
She noticed there was no mention of Gun Club, but she added that to the list. Then she ran web searches for each one, looking for mentions online.
Once she found those, she could backtrack, find more people to talk to.
With any luck, she’d find the Messenger himself.
Working her way through dozens of pages of results, she found plenty of hits.
“Dark Time” led to a Google Chrome extension, a music sequencer, books about the cold war, and a hip-hop duo.
“The Industrial Machine” led to large machine shops, computer-controlled equipment, and, oddly, a vast world of sewing enthusiasts.
“The Messenger,” which seemed the most promising, led to a movie, a video game, a TV show, and multiple magazines from previous decades.
“Gun Club” led to, yes, ten thousand gun ranges and shooting clubs.
None of it seemed remotely close to what she was looking for, a group of freaked-out people working toward some kind of cataclysm.
She went to a half dozen social media sites and tried again.
Lots of results, so presumably there might be some signal in the noise, but if so, she couldn’t see it.
She tried the usual encrypted communications apps, WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram, and a few others, looking for any public groups with those key words, but nothing popped up there, either.
Not even anything with common coded language, which some extremists had learned to use to keep from getting blocked by various apps.
After several hours of this, June shoved back her chair and began to pace the house.
She was a good researcher, with years of experience and an affinity for the web, but she’d found zip, nada, bupkus.
She didn’t get it. Enderby and Reed were tech professionals.
Wouldn’t they use the technology at their disposal?
Sighing, she went back to the dining nook and picked up the cassette player, ejecting the tape and turning it in her hands. This was technology, too. Old technology, but it still worked.
Also, it was analog, not digital. Which made it inherently more secure, because it was simply harder to copy and distribute.
If you wanted to throw a monkey wrench into the so-called Industrial Machine, maybe this was the best way to go about it.
Build a physical network and distribute cassette tapes, person to person, to the secret faithful.
With everything offline, there was no electronic chatter.
That was basically what Osama bin Laden had done after he went into hiding, she thought.
He’d sent handwritten letters and analog recordings into the world using an elaborate system of secret couriers, which prevented the United States from tracking any electronic signals back to his hideout.
The messages were distributed hand to hand until they reached the radical imams and their madrasas.
He’d directed his entire international operation that way.
Despite the intensive efforts of the most fearsome military and intelligence apparatus the world had ever seen, bin Laden had escaped detection for almost ten years.
Also, if you were going to communicate in secret, audio was an especially powerful way to do it.
Perhaps the most powerful, because of its intimacy.
Wearing headphones, it felt like a whisper in your ear, or a voice in your head.
Perfect when you wanted to convince scared or angry people to do crazy shit.
Plus, for tech workers like Enderby and Reed, this old-school vibe was probably part of the appeal. Couriers and audio messages and secret meetings. It would make them feel like spies. Or revolutionaries.
Man, when she found this Messenger guy, she was going to bitch-slap him so hard he’d forget his own name.
If Peter and Lewis didn’t put a bullet in his head first.