Нэнси Кресс - The End Is Nigh

“I don’t know,” I say. “He’s probably a mirror image of me if I hadn’t grown up in the cold.” Shivering away with a mother who literally drank herself to death one winter when we couldn’t seal the gaps to keep its icy fingers out. A lot of free lunch and foster care later and here I was. No vested stock options. “There’s a lot of stuff in his manifesto I could have written.”

“You’re not Norton Haswell. You’re not trying to kill people you disagree with,” Toto says.

“Point,” I say. I had never hacked the lane-keeping and pre-crash emergency functions of a senator’s luxury car to try and kill him. Haswell, though, had. It was the act that led to him getting tagged with that fat, juicy FBI reward.

Toto points at the road ahead. “It’s all politics and bullshit, and we all have the right to get as worked up as we want. This is fucking America. It’s what we do , man. But ain’t nothing worth killing people over until people’s being killed on your side. You make the first move, it ain’t disagreement, it ain’t the mess of democracy—you’re a fucking traitor. A terrorist. And that always leads to the response coming back in kind. And then, basically, you’ve just shit your own bed.”

I grunt. “Okay. Let’s find the mealy little fucker before he does something really newsworthy like actually killing a senator.”

And Toto’s right. I’m feeling kinda righteous about this hunt.

The Jitters Cafe in a small town in Nebraska offers free WiFi with purchase. They print a temporary, one-hour password out on the receipt, which I have to squint at as I type the long string into my laptop because the nines and sixes, zeros and Os, all look the same.

This gets me onto their internal network.

Toto sits over by the door, carefully eating a ham and cheese breakfast bagel (no bagel please) with knife and fork, an oversized never-ending mug of coffee steaming behind it.

“You really think he’s posting anonymous rage-comments on news articles from a coffee shop in Nebraska?” he’d asked earlier as we’d eased down the small main street, huddled against the plains like a modern version of some old west movie set.

“The linguistic fingerprints match up.”

It’s the little, stupid things that get us, isn’t it? Haswell ranting away in his free time. He could be holed up in any of the small apartments on the second story of the old brick buildings. Or in one of the trailers on the edge of town. He was coming into town to use the free internet to argue.

And maybe other things.

He’d only been here a couple days. Probably moving soon. Toto’d gotten us here faster than we could have flown, with the connections and delays.

Packet sniffer up and running, I texted Toto.

After a casual minute, Toto checks his phone and taps a reply.

Don’t need it.

I look up from my screen at Toto, and he nods toward the bathroom at the end of a hallway. Someone’s just come out and sat back down at a laptop. I frown. Really? It doesn’t look like our guy, but Toto nods at him again.

Go on, Toto texts.

I walk over to our quarry, who is thoroughly glued to his screen. He’s grown out his hair, has a Huskers cap skewed off to the side, and is sporting a green flannel shirt under dirty overalls that belong to a local utility company. Apparently his bathroom break has dammed up a flurry of thoughts, because he’s typing at top speed, face scrunched up, attacking the keyboard.

“Norton Haswell, I’m—”

I never really get too far along introducing myself. He rabbits quicker than I would have thought for a fellow keyboarder, slamming his shoulder into my stomach to get around me.

Coughing, my lungs flattened, I stagger half-heartedly along the hallway after him. People stand up, concerned. This is open carry territory, and I don’t figure Toto wants to get shot, so I shout “Bounty hunters! He’s wanted for skipping bail and is on the wanted list.”

As I shout—more like wheeze—all that, Toto steps up and clotheslines Haswell in the chest, then, just as expertly, catches him on the way down like a dancer doing a romantic dip. He casually bear hugs the man to him so I can put the cuffs on.

Toto leads him to the back of the car while I leave my card with the baristas. We don’t need the local cops coming in hot and bothered.

“Got lucky,” I murmur as we tear out of town.

“We were due,” Toto says.

“Still think we should dump him off with the locals.” I look up the mirror, where Haswell glowers at us but says nothing.

“No.” Toto shakes his head. “You know they’ll just as likely lose our processing paperwork and try to hand the claim over to a buddy. Trust me.”

“Just because you grew up in one good-ole-boy small town doesn’t mean you know how they all work,” I tell him.

But he doesn’t answer. He’s done hashing this one out. We argued about this on the way: Toto doesn’t trust the feds to give us the reward in a timely manner. Haswell’s a double win. He’s got the FBI reward on him, but he has a substantial bond as well. When he tried to kill that senator by hacking his car, he was jailed. Got out on bond, then skipped.

If we return him to the county he skipped out from, then no matter how long the FBI paperwork takes, no matter what actually happens, we get the percentage of the bond we’re due.

Toto settles into his comfortable altered driving state while I sit and fidget. My work is done. There’s nothing to do but wait for the long drive to pass. I load up an old, favored RPG on the laptop and start working through a side quest.

After hours of frosty silence, interrupted only by the wail of my vanquished enemies from the laptop, Haswell finally breaks the car’s quiet. His voice is guttural, laced with rage, and a little confusion. “How’d you find me?”

I smile and pause the game.

One master to another. But as I open my mouth, Toto looks over, his eyes ungluing as he comes out of his drive trance, and he shakes his head. Don’t reveal our methods. Don’t offer anything.

“We’re prisoners of our habits,” I say. But even that gets me a death glare from Toto. He glowers at me until he’s sure I get the point, then turns his focus back to driving. I lapse back into the game.

But Haswell’s not done with us. Like a terrier with a bone, he wants to keep chewing at this. “I’ve been sitting back here, going over where I might’ve made a mistake, and I can’t think of anything.” Our eyes meet in the mirror, and Haswell has moved from anger to respect. “Whatever you did, it was impressive.”

I really, really wish I could preen. Instead, I shrug. “Nothing special. Just look for weaknesses.”

“No,” Haswell says with messianic certainty. “It’s not nothing special. It was something very special. I’m impressed. Don’t be full of shit. You and I both know that whatever you did, it was clever. And very few people can do it. You’re one of the select.”

Well… he’s not wrong. But I’m still not giving him anything.

Haswell leans back, his handcuffs clinking. “Does it ever bug you?” he asks.

“Does what bug me?”

“The bullshit. This job of yours. When you could be doing something superior. I was sunk the moment they noticed me, long before I went after the senator. You remember those kids from Steubenville, Ohio? They passed that drunk girl around and fingered her, took pictures and laughed because they were the jocks? You know the hacker who got the pictures? He faces more jail time than the rapists got. Because corporations wrote those laws, you can get in more trouble for copying a DVD than raping someone.” Haswell leans forward between us. “Doesn’t that make you just want to get out on the street and rage?”