Seven Unholy Days Read online

She walked by on her way to Brett and smiled briefly as she passed. Shoulder-length blond hair, tan skin the texture of butter, eyes I can’t find words to describe. They talked quietly for a moment, and he handed her a key. Girlfriend or wife? On her way out she caught me off guard by stopping.

  “Where have I seen you?” she said.

  “On TV,” Tarkleton said. “This is Matthew Decker.”

  “Really, the computer guy?” she said.

  I nodded and smiled. She extended her hand. “I’m Jana Fulton. Very good to meet you, Mr. Decker.” Fulton. Damn.

  “My pleasure, Jana.” Her touch was like everything else about her, and another of my senses flooded with unfamiliar feelings. Our eyes locked for the briefest moment and I didn’t care that her jerk of a husband was fifteen feet away. I wanted to believe she didn’t care either, but I couldn’t trust my whirling psyche. She smiled again, and then she was gone.

  I glanced toward Brett. He was oblivious.

  4:30 PM CENTRAL DAYLIGHT TIME (LOCAL)

  THE PEABODY HOTEL

  MEMPHIS, TENNESSEE

  Abraham Hart sat on the Victorian leather sofa in a white linen suit, dark hands laid neatly on his lap. Parked underneath coal-black eyebrows, his startling blue eyes flicked back and forth, looking first at Dane, then Riff. Both men looked hardcore military: sturdy frames, buzz cuts, Dane in blue jeans and a desert-camo fatigue jacket, Riff in black cargo pants and a painted-on black tee.

  “Messers Christian,” Hart said, “perhaps you can explain this to me,” pointing a manicured fingertip at a lamp on an end table, unremarkable except for the fact it was on.

  “Remember, sir, this was a test,” Dane said, “and quite successful.”

  Hart slowly moved the pointing finger in front of his face, bringing it to his lips in a call for silence. “Mr. Christian, I never classified this as a test. I classified it as step one. My tests were carried out some time ago.”

  Another staring session, as Hart reflected on a series of mysterious power outages in the western states a few years earlier, and another more recent string of failures on the Atlantic seaboard. Mysterious to some, not to him. “You are handsomely paid. I did not hire you for a display of trial-and-error buffoonery.”

  Riff was turning red, his eyes narrowing. “Now look—”

  Hart raised his finger back to his lips. “No.” Civilizations rose and fell during the silence. Finally he resumed, punctuating each word with an angry tap of his finger on the table. “You look. My instructions were specific. Three states. Three hours. I got less than one hour. Why?”

  “Sir, this is a minor asset problem,” Dane said. “We have two people at Central, neither one aware of the other. Both failed to effectively limit Decker.”

  “I see.”

  Dane hesitated before continuing. “I must remind you that this game with Decker is—”

  Hart drew a sharp breath and raised his hand. “Do not presume to lecture me. Simply explain how you plan to restore the primary code.”

  “I’ll reinstall it myself. There’s no indication our code has been discovered at the other three centers, but as a precaution I’m going with the propagation code on the re-install. It will spread to the other three centers, as well as the archival code. By zero-hour, our code will be in place in all four centers as well as the archives, and the system will be locked.”

  “What about the failed assets?”

  “Riff and I will deal with them. As for Decker—”

  “I will deal with Decker.” Hart tapped his lip. “Personally.”

  Dane nodded. “Everything will be in order, sir. We guarantee it.”

  Hart closed his eyes and drew a slow, deep breath through his nostrils. The eyelids slowly raised and he stared at neither man, instead gazing at the space between them. “Be very sure that it is, Messers Christian. Leave me now.”

  Hart sat alone in the lavish hotel room and evaluated the afternoon’s events. The three states were of course a test, a very successful one and the last step before the Glorious Beginning, even though he dared not let the Christian brothers know. The flock deserved praise and encouragement. Barbaric mercenaries deserved nothing.

  Decker had behaved predictably. He checked his watch and smiled—mere hours remained before the public’s love affair with that silly little wunderkind would lurch to a halt. Over the course of the coming week, destiny would be fulfilled, and in the process he would crush Decker like a cockroach beneath his mighty sole. The next few hours, however, were critical. Perhaps a bit of diversion was in order, something to occupy Decker’s mind until the plan was fully in motion.

  Hart opened and booted his laptop, then established a link to his main personal computer seven hundred miles away. He composed an email, and through a series of tunneled commands, ordered the remote machine to rebuild and send the message via an elaborate network of anonymizers that would eliminate any chance for his crafty adversary to track its origin.

  He shut down the laptop and switched on the television to CNN. File video footage of the Yellow Creek facility was playing while the anchor talked. “Join us this evening for in-depth coverage of today’s blackout in the South. Up next, we take a look at televangelism. Is it about God or about dollars?”

  Hart switched off the set, walked to the window, and looked to the sky. “God,” he said with a sneer, “you had your chance and look what a mess you made. Prepare to step aside, old man.”

  3

  8:40 PM CENTRAL DAYLIGHT TIME (LOCAL)

  IUKA COUNTRY INN

  FIFTEEN MILES SOUTHEAST OF YELLOW CREEK

  I combed Beeman’s station for clues and found none. Whatever he deleted, he did thoroughly. Nor did I find irregularities—beyond the one nasty bug—during an exhaustive check of every system in the plant. Plugging the hole presented a problem: I had to find it first.

  Now, on Tarkleton’s recommendation, here I sat in a closet-sized room at the Iuka Country Inn. He was due at nine-thirty for a trip to Beeman’s house.

  I showered, put on jeans and a tee-shirt, and powered up my laptop. My plan was to get in a bit of research on the GCE control crew, especially Harold Beeman, before Tarkleton arrived.

  “You have new mail,” the laptop announced. There were only eighteen, so I decided to take care of them first. I moved through the list quickly, answering the ones that warranted it, filing some, trashing some.

  Number sixteen broke the routine. It was from a gibberish Hotmail address and had no subject:

  Return-Path:

  Delivered-To: x7ijljAweRRv -deckerdigital:[email protected]

  X-Envelope-To: [email protected]

  X-Originating-IP: [66.156.171.40]

  From: [email protected]

  To: [email protected]

  Subject:

  Never more horror, nor worse of days

  Than those to come to he who stays.

  Your filthy secrets Are in jeopardy.

  The prickly hairs on the back of my neck stood up and a chill rippled down my spine. This was my private address; only a handful of people had access to it. No one accidentally emails [email protected], and I did have some features in my past best left alone. Nothing that rose to the level of “filthy secrets” as far as I was concerned, but not good for business, either.

  What the hell was going on? This didn’t fit the Sons of Perdition. I could burn every one of them and they knew it. They wouldn’t confront me directly.

  WHAM! WHAM! WHAM! The knocks shook the door in its frame, and I jumped six inches off the chair. I went to the door and looked through the peephole. Tarkleton was early.

  “Come in, Mr. Tarkleton.”

  “Thanks, but you’re supposed to be calling me Tark now, remember?”

  “Tark it is. Listen, I’m sorry we got off to a rough start today.”

  “Not a problem, it was edgy for all of us.” He cocked his head and looked at me. “You sure you�
�re okay?”

  “Yeah, why?”

  “You look a little pale.”

  “It’s been a long day. I’m fine, really. Ready to go see Beeman?”

  “I tried his cell phone about ten times. He’s not answering. I’ll get the sheriff looking for him.”

  “By the way, I think you’re right. This doesn’t really fit for the Sons of Perdition gang I mentioned earlier.”

  “What changed your mind?”

  “Just thinking it over. Doesn’t feel right.”

  We wrapped up the conversation and he left. I almost told him about the email, but I decided to keep it to myself for the time being. Tarkleton was beginning to seem like a nice enough fellow, but I’ve found it’s best to build trust the same way you build a house of cards: very carefully.

  Back in front of the laptop, I went to work backtracking the email. It was naturally from an anonymous email provider, in this case Hotmail. Fortunately (for me, anyway), a lot of these brand-name systems aren’t as secure as they would have people believe. I was inside their traceroute log files within forty seconds, ready to see where the sender of that email came from when he logged onto the Hotmail server.

  I found the IP easily enough and ran a quick trace on it. That was where I hit a brick wall. Whoever it was had the good sense to come into Hotmail from a cloaking service that hid his identity. I could punch through that brick wall, but it carried a detection risk and, depending on how many anonymizers they bounced through on the way to Hotmail, it could take a lot of time and crunching numbers. I decided it wasn’t worth it. Yet.

  Checking out Beeman was next on my list. CEPOCS wasn’t my first government contract, and I had left a few back doors scattered about. It took two minutes to pull up a detailed dossier on Mr. Beeman from the Department of Public Utilities database. His DOPU file was unremarkable: a bunch of typical tech training and certifications, dependable worker, and no arrest record, not even a traffic ticket, IQ 121. Married, no kids. The file had a picture of his wife, Mary, who looked to be about the size of a Volkswagen. Harold better stick with the missionary position.

  Abdul Abidi’s research was more interesting. He came to the U.S. from Iran on a student visa and eventually became a citizen. He had more than typical tech training. He was Dr. Abidi, with a Ph.D. in applied computer science from none other than MIT. Noteworthy, to say the least. IQ 154, single, parents and a number of siblings still back home in Iran. Lots of speeding tickets, but nothing more serious. What was an MIT Ph.D. doing in the GCE control room? I downloaded his file to the hard drive for easy access and a deeper look later on.

  The file on Brett Fulton was as shallow as he appeared to be. He had an associate’s degree in information technology from Itawamba Community College, Fulton, Mississippi, not far from where I sat. Football star there in the junior college division, no 1-A scholarship offers when he finished his second year. Walked on at Ole Miss, got cut, took a swing at the head coach, got suspended from school and never came back. No IQ listed. Boring jock who wasn’t even good enough at that. The bottom of each file had a row of thumbnail images of family members and one of them drew my cursor to it like a magnet.

  I clicked to open it, and Jana Fulton’s picture filled the screen. Twenty-seven, a trauma nurse, and sister of a prick. I stared at the picture for another couple of minutes, then saved her file to the hard drive, too.

  It had been a hectic day and I was worn out, but I decided to go ahead and include Tarkleton in my brief investigation. “NO MATCH” was the surprising result of the search. I made a note to re-run the search later. There was obviously an error of some sort. Anyone associated with the power grid had a file. That included me, although my files were somewhat sanitized.

  WHAM! WHAM! WHAM! The door shook just like last time, for good reason. Tark was back. I opened the door and he burst into the room, breathing hard, his pale blue shirt drenched with sweat and stuck to the big hairy belly underneath. I remembered that his name was all over the screen of my laptop, so I closed the lid as quickly and discreetly as I could. He was looking that way, but I couldn’t tell if he saw anything or not. I hoped not.

  “You’re not gonna believe this,” he said. “Harold Beeman is dead.”

  4

  9:20 PM CENTRAL DAYLIGHT TIME (LOCAL)

  MEMPHIS INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT

  Gulfstream two-one-six, Memphis Tower. Cleared for departure on runway three-six left, sir.”

  “Roger, Memphis Tower, Gulfstream two-one-six. Departing runway three-six left.”

  “Roger, two-one-six. Contact Memphis Center on one-two-eight-point-five, and have a good flight, sir. Looks like a beautiful night all the way.”

  “Memphis Tower, two-one-six. Airborne, contacting Memphis Center on one-two-eight-point-five.”

  The cabin of the twin-engine business jet was quiet by the standards of kerosene burners, immaculate by any measure. Only three months old, the aircraft’s interior smelled of new leather and carpet. Hart swiveled his seat to face the window on his right as the pilot arched the G-V smartly upward, ascending out of Memphis airspace at two thousand feet per minute. The street lights below first became soft-edged amber-orange pools of light, then a glittering medley of interconnected and criss-crossing lines as the plane turned to a northeasterly heading while continuing to climb.

  Twenty miles laterally and four miles vertically from Memphis, the city looked like a seething cauldron of hot coals laced with a thousand rivulets of molten lava. Hart returned his seat to the forward-facing position, musing to himself that Hell probably looked something like that from a distance, with its fiery lakes of brimstone. Except that Hell could not be turned off.

  He moved to another seat, pulled his laptop from an attaché, and raised the lid. He connected to the Internet through the Gulfstream’s satellite-connected WiFi system. Still no word from Decker. What was that hedonistic nightmare of a human being up to? He checked his watch. Less than four hours remained.

  10:25 PM CENTRAL DAYLIGHT TIME (LOCAL)

  IUKA COUNTRY INN

  We were on our way back from the crime scene, where someone had broken poor Beeman’s neck before tossing him in the Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway. No suspects. No clues. Nobody saw a thing.

  “Wonder where old Beeman is right now,” Tark said as we headed back toward the opulence of the Iuka Country Inn.

  “Zipped up in a black bag?”

  “Nah, that’s just his body, worthless as tits on a boar hog now. I’m talking about his eternal soul. It’s all that matters in the end, you know.”

  Here it came, Jesus mumbo-jumbo, soul-saving in the Bible Belt, time for me to get right with God. Oh how I knew the song and dance. “I don’t mean to be rude, Tark, but I’d just as soon steer clear of religion. I don’t believe in it.”

  “Don’t believe in religion, you mean, or don’t believe in God at all?”

  “None of it.”

  “What a shame.”

  “Not a shame to me, I’d just rather deal with the reality in front of me. And that reality just got a bit stranger, wouldn’t you say?”

  “What do you think is going on here, Matthew?”

  “I think Beeman screwed with my code and it got him killed. You?”

  “Hard to figure. I just don’t understand what anybody has to gain by tinkering with the juice.”

  “I’d like to shore up the security in CEPOCS, put a few extra blockades in place until we can figure out exactly what’s going on.”

  “You think they might try something else?”

  The temptation to tell him about the email was strong but I had no way to know how he’d react. If I could track these people down without spawning twenty questions from the authorities about my past, so much the better. “You never know. I think they’ve proven they’re serious.”

  “No argument there. What exactly can you do?”

  “I can implement a total system lockdown.”

  “Class three?”

  I nodded. He sighe
d. “That disables AGM,” he said.

  Automated Grid Maintenance was the CEPOCS feature that made it possible for three-man crews to keep fifteen to twenty states running smoothly. It monitored every grid, every switch, constantly making adjustments and rerouting flow. Without it, every bit of that was done manually.

  “True enough,” I said, “but that’s the only way to guarantee no more modifications until we can get a handle on this situation.”

  “When did you have in mind?”

  “Sooner the better. How soon can you have a crew in place?”

  “It’ll take a crew of at least twelve or we’ll have fried switches all over the place.”

  “I’m aware of that.”

  “I’ll go home and start working the phone. We’ll shoot for first thing tomorrow morning; best I can do, Matthew.”

  “Morning it is.”

  The rest of the drive back was fairly quiet. It had been a long day and another lay just ahead. By eleven o’clock I was burrowed into my bed and listening to the soothing hum of the old air conditioner.

  5

  11:36 PM CENTRAL DAYLIGHT TIME (LOCAL)

  IUKA COUNTRY INN

  The urgency of needing to know where the email came from won out over fatigue; I got out of bed and fired up my notebook. Espionage and tiptoed malice were bad enough. Murder was an escalation that demanded answers. My quarry had made it personal and he needed a name, something for me to focus on. After staring at his email address for a bit I settled on “69” as a nickname for the bandit and penciled it in on the top of a legal pad, then drew a vertical line to split the page. On the left side I’d keep track of steps and clues. The right would be a list of any weaknesses I found along the way.

  I logged into a shell account that hid my identity under a dozen layers of aliases and went to work. The first order of business was building more anonymity, thick insulation against intrusion detection that could be traced back to me. I did this by routing my activity through a series of servers in disparate geographical locations. Seattle to New Delhi, over to Madrid and back to New York, then to London by way of Taipei. Satisfied that I was sufficiently cloaked, I worked my way back into the Hotmail server and then into the first anonymizer service 69 had used. A commercial service, it was set up quite well, enough so to keep out 99% of those who might come knocking. Three minutes later, the details for the account holder scrolled into view on the screen. I penciled in JANE SMITH on the pad. Paid for the account with a money order sent through snail mail. Not good.