Paolo Bacigalupi - The Doubt Factory

“That’s the beginning of a horror flick, I think,” Tank said. “Rats getting out. Eating people in their sleep.”

Adam laughed and made kissy faces at the rat. “This little guy? Nah. He wouldn’t dare touch me until my body was cold.”

“They’re rats,” Kook said as she started typing code. “They eat the ears off babies.”

“Really?” Adam regarded his pet with interest. “I thought it was ferrets that did that.”

“They’re all rodents. They’re going to take over the fucking world,” Kook said.

“If I were a mouse, I’d live in the walls,” Tank said. “No one would ever find me.”

“Don’t sell yourself short, little guy,” Adam said. “If you were a mouse, you’d build a better cat trap. Fuckers would never know what hit them.”

The images on the camera feeds changed abruptly. Moses leaned forward, suddenly interested.

“Hey there, looks like our friends are finally waking up.”

Cop cars were arriving. A lot of them. Official vehicles starting to gather. Chevy SUVs. A Lincoln town car. Moses zoomed in and started snapping license plates, capturing faces of people as they emerged. Storing images, all of them coming fast and furious now. Lots of activity. More than he would have expected. He’d expected some reaction, sure, but this looked more like straight-up panic.

“What do you make of this?” Moses asked. He pointed at an SUV as it pulled up in front of the Bankses’ house and more people emerged.

Tank peered over Moses’s shoulder. “Williams and Crowe, for sure. Recognize them anywhere.”

Adam pressed in for a look. “Hello, old friends.”

Kook got up from her workstation to join them. Everyone peered at the screen and the ants’ nest of activity swarming around the Banks household. “Damn. That’s a lot of heat,” Kook muttered.

“More than I expected,” Moses agreed.

“We screw something up?”

“Don’t know, but it looks like we kicked the ant pile, whatever’s happening.”

“They’re freaking,” Tank observed. “For sure, they’re freaking.”

“Some of those guys look like feds,” Adam said.

“We might need to speed things up,” Moses said. “If the FBI is getting in on this, everything gets more serious.”

“Or else slow down,” Adam suggested.

“This was bound to happen sometime,” Kook said. “We’ve got to be on some watch list already, and you know it. NSA, FBI. Big data has got to have something on us by now.”

“If they had something on us, we’d already be caught,” Moses said.

“Does this mean we need to be worried?” Adam asked. “Should we think about pulling back?”

Should we? Moses turned the question over in his mind. Thinking of all the work they’d done, all the setup. Everything.

We’ve been careful. I’ve been careful .

Except it wasn’t totally true. He’d been careful all the way until he’d let that private school stuffed shirt throw him off his game. Even if he denied it out loud, inside he knew it had been a mistake. He could have stolen the guy’s key card anywhere. Waited until he was off campus. But against all reason, Moses had been driven to go onto the campus itself.

Sloppy. His uncle would have shouted at him that he was sloppy.

So why’d you do it?

Moses shoved down the question. What was done was done. He focused on the activity. Was this something he needed to be worried about? Had he made a bigger mistake that he couldn’t see? Did he have a blind spot?

“No,” Moses said finally. “There’s still no way they could have any idea what we’re up to.” He studied all the people going in and out of the house, figuring the angles. “I sure wouldn’t mind being able to hear what they’re up to inside, though.”

“I told you we should have bugged it right from the start,” Kook said.

“And that would have gone real sweet if the little brother messed with the Xbox and found us peeking in before we were ready.”

“You think it’s worth the risk now?”

“I don’t think we’ve got a choice. With Williams and Crowe on the scene, we need to be inside their heads. No more of this outside-looking-in stuff.”

Kook pinched her lip. “With Williams and Crowe on the scene, it’s going to be harder to bug.”

“We can do it, though, right?”

Kook gave him an annoyed glance. “Of course we can do it. Who do you think you’re talking to? We’ll have eyes inside before you blink.”

Tank was nodding in agreement. “They got tons of gear in there we can piggyback.”

“So let’s do it,” Moses said. “I want to know what they’re thinking before they think it. Information is power. I want to make sure we’ve got more information than they do.”

Kook studied the activity boiling around the house. “Kind of fun to see old Simon Banks guessing and in the dark.”

“It’s going to be even more fun once we’re inside his head.” Moses clapped his hands. “Okay. Let’s get some eyes and ears inside that house.”

“No problem, boss.” Tank slammed down his helmet shield and headed off.

Kook waved to Adam. “We’re going to put some more things on the shopping list,” she said.

They started conferring while Moses lingered at the monitors, watching the Banks household scramble.

What’s got you so spooked? Sure, we’re poking at you, but you look like you’re prepping for the zombie apocalypse. What’s got you so riled up?

It didn’t matter, he decided. The plan would keep rolling. This time, he knew more than Simon Banks did.

Knowledge was power, and information was control. And for the first time in his life, Moses Cruz had more of both than Simon Banks.

You can call in all the guns and favors you like , Moses thought. It still won’t save you when I bring down the hammer .

ALIX LAY IN HER BED UNDERmoonlight, trying to make sense of the strange new world she inhabited.

If she pulled back the curtains, she could make out the surveillance van parked on the street. Somewhere, there were others, too. All of them waiting for… what? An attack? A kidnapping?

It felt so melodramatic to think that anything was wrong at all. The street looked so safe. Graceful oaks. Broad swaths of manicured lawns and gardens. A few lights still glowed at the entrances to various homes, marking pathways up to arched doorways. Peaceful.

And yet a stranger was out there and, if Dad was to be believed, maybe something bigger. Maybe a whole group bent on kidnapping her or Jonah. People who wanted to use the two of them to get to Dad.

It was like the stories she heard that came from places like Bangkok or Mexico. When Alix went to Cancun for winter vacation, she remembered being warned that Mexico was dangerous. When she went online, it was full of reports of people who had been kidnapped and ended up in shallow graves. Even Guillermo del Toro’s father had been kidnapped, and del Toro was a movie director. The guy had done Hollywood movies, and because of that, people had targeted his family for kidnapping and ransom. Alix remembered thinking that things like that happened in Mexico but didn’t happen here.

Except now maybe they did.

She got out of bed and padded downstairs. She was wearing a long T-shirt that she liked to sleep in. The day had been hot, but now everything had cooled off. Her skin turned to gooseflesh as she tiptoed down the stairs.

2:12 flashed on the stove clock, green light casting across the kitchen.

She slipped into Dad’s office, not even sure what she was looking for.

Ask your father .

This was absurd. She could practically see Jonah mocking her for being a silly girl. She sat down in her dad’s chair. Touched the trackpad on his computer. The screen flickered alive, showing a password challenge.