Мэтт Рихтел - Dead on Arrival

“Thanks to Lantern.”

Jackie pulled a different chair to Alex’s computer. She started clacking away. A few minutes later, she had three windows open. One belonged to the Lantern dashboard. A second showed a list of major telecommunications towers.

Then she pulled out her phone and pursed her lips. Someone was looking at her LinkedIn picture. From the IP address, she could tell that whoever was scrutinizing her picture was located in the house belonging to Captain Eleanor Hall.

“Wrinkle,” she said. “I doubt you got there on your own.”

Eleanor Hall had had nothing to connect to Jackie Badger. Most certainly, Jackie thought, this is Lyle’s doing. But Lyle’s phone was still at his apartment. No, he must have left it there and he must be with her now.

Good man, Lyle, she thought. Rising to the occasion. Me too, Jackie thought. Me too. And soon to be together. She turned to a screen that showed a map of major radio towers around the world. She enlarged the map to focus on the western United States. She hovered her cursor over Northern California until it brought up a box with information for Sutro Radio Tower. It stood tall across Twin Peaks over San Francisco. It was a radio tower, true, but many of these were in the control of Lantern partners, so she had access. Just as powerful as cell towers, but with wider distribution. She clicked to open the box and inserted a string of code from a save key.

She sipped coffee. Tedious work. She looked down at Alex, whom she’d now put into a sitting position, fixing her eyes on her phone.

“Time to get you six billion fellow travelers.”

Jackie focused her attention on a small rectangular box within the larger box she’d been interacting with. She clicked onto a new window on the monitor and called up CNN. It was continuing wall-to-wall coverage of the impending Million Gun March. It was a little less than a day away. Gawkers and participants had begun gathering at the Washington Mall. So far, just one person had been seen with a gun and had been arrested by twenty members of the National Guard in a clip being shown again and again. Ominously, a growing number of mobile homes had streamed into the capital. Permitted gun owners in their “homes.” Would they march?

Jackie clicked away and then returned to the small rectangular box on the Lantern dashboard, inserting her cursor on a command line. She typed: 18:00, and then hit enter.

17:59:59 it read. Seventeen hours and fifty-nine minutes.

17:59:58

One day and counting. Lots of work to do. She clicked on the Mount Wilson radio tower in Los Angeles. The easier stuff she’d save until later, using the back door she’d created into the major telecom providers, like Verizon and Comcast, China Telecom, Vodafone, Nippon Telegraph, and on. New modems and routers for everyone or most people around the globe. All with the power to hit the human pause button.

17:59:56

17:59:55

17:59:54

With Jerry behind the wheel of the Miata, Eleanor in the passenger seat, and Lyle squeezed painfully into what passed for a backseat, the threesome stared at a greenish-brown-colored flat located near the western edge of San Francisco, not far from the beach. Salty wet air clung to these attached flats, the colors so worn they took on the dull flavor of the fog itself.

“You think she’s in there?” Eleanor asked.

Lyle didn’t answer. His eyes settled on a shaggy-looking mat lying before the front door. Something elevated the mat slightly, a box or package hidden beneath. Lyle pushed his way out of the Miata.

Jerry reached around and felt for his gun. Watching Lyle wander off without warning reminded Jerry of something, a memory he couldn’t quite grasp. “I don’t trust this guy for a second, Eleanor.”

She exhaled loudly, a tacit agreement, but not a direct confirmation. She didn’t want to give Jerry permission to do anything stupid. They watched Lyle knock on the door. Wait, knock again. Lean down and look and move the mat aside with his toe and stare at what looked to be a package. Lyle seemed satisfied and loped back to the car.

“Package postmarked a week ago,” he said. “I don’t think anyone is around.”

“Who’s the package addressed to?”

“Jackie Badger,” Lyle said.

They’d found the address in minutes with the help of a friend of Jerry’s in the police department. They also discovered Jackie worked on Google’s campus in Mountain View, at least that’s what it said on a CV they found online. But they figured they’d never get in there and Lyle’s plan had been to try to visit her place while she was gone.

Now, standing here, he thought aloud, “We could call the police, or wait until night to see if she comes back. Or…” He paused. “We could see about the back. There’s a small yard, accessible by an alley. Looks pretty desolate back there, so if there’s a back door…” He let it hang there, stared at the house. “In any case, it’s, what, four fifteen, so we don’t have long before—”

His sentence was interrupted by Jerry opening his door. He stood and straightened his dark blue windbreaker.

“I got this,” he said. “You two relax.”

He walked purposefully to the street corner. Lyle felt a tug of conscience and turned to see it was being beamed at him by Eleanor. She stared at Lyle and he shook his head, knowing exactly what he’d done. It wasn’t quite condemnation, though.

“Let’s use the powers of the gun for good,” he said.

“Watch out or it will turn on you.”

Afew minutes later, the front door opened. Jerry beckoned them inside. Lyle looked around the street and didn’t see so much as a mail truck. It was still shy of quitting time. He and Eleanor stepped out of the fog. Jerry closed the door behind them.

“What did you do?” Eleanor asked.

“Piece of cake. Some stuff I learned doing a hotshot-firefighting weekend training. I’ll spare you the gory details.” Lyle thought it condescending but mostly was focused on the musty smell in this classic midcentury San Francisco flat. A narrow hallway led to a bathroom and two bedrooms in the back. Halfway down the hallway, a doorway led to the kitchen and to the right of the front door, a living room and dining room with creaky wooden floors. The place looked little lived in. Lyle closed his eyes and inhaled. He took in humidity that had seeped into these walls, the low-level mold. He winced; virus could take root here. That wasn’t today’s business. They searched the house, first with great care, and then with more urgency when nothing of relevance, or even mild interest, revealed itself. Other than that the outdated and Spartan decor—an old futon couch in the front room, a garage-sale dining-room table, a beanbag chair, a refrigerator with a pizza magnet holding a sloppily written shopping list and little inside—reminded him very much of his own surroundings and habits. It told him that Jackie Badger focused on things inside her head, not the external. Know your virus, he thought, as he descended wooden stairs from the back of the kitchen to, presumably, the garage. Halfway down, he heard: “Dr. Martin… Lyle.”

It was Eleanor, calling from the bedroom. Lyle found the airline captain looking at a photograph. Of Lyle. He was standing at the café near his house, holding his bicycle, about to mount it. It looked like the photo had been taken by a long lens.

“It was tucked in behind that picture,” Eleanor said. She gestured to a picture of the Golden Gate Bridge, now hung askew after Eleanor had delved behind it. She looked at the picture. “I wonder why she’s collecting photos of people who look bewildered,” she teased lightly.