Chapter 53
Their discussion of the few options possible was turning into another circular conversation characteristic of life in Dominion.
“If we storm the house,” Colin said, “the hostages would likely be killed before we could get to them.”
Wally scanned the house and their surroundings again. “There’s little chance of getting on the roof and in through the windows.”
“Not with Colter and two of his men keeping watch. Stun grenades are out if those vests contain explosives.”
“Which they probably do,” she said. They kept coming to the same point that stalled any progress.
A shot came from inside the house. Everyone ducked for cover before peeking out as if they actually could see what was going on inside Colter’s headquarters.
“Wait,” Harry said. “It’s only one shot.” He called Colter’s number. “He’s not answering. Maybe he shot himself?”
“What about his two men?” She looked up at the bedroom window but only shadows moved past it.
“He’s still not answering.”
“Can one of our snipers see what happened?”
“There!” Colin pointed to the house.
Kate and Susan were helping Kelly out the front door. None of them were wearing vests anymore.
Two men from FBI SWAT ran to them while the rest of their team and Portland SWAT took up positions to provide covering fire if required.
Colin held his finger to his ear to better hear what he was being told. “It’s the Griffin woman. Our south sniper says he shot her. They were having some kind of argument, she charged him. It may have been an accident.”
“I’m supposed to believe Colter shot Mattie by mistake?”
Harry stopped trying to reach Colter by phone and hugged Kelly when she arrived with Kate and Susan.
Joan asked, “Are you all right?”
Kelly gave her a weak salute and nodded. “Yeah, a sucker punch, that’s all. Mostly, I feel stupid for not seeing it coming.”
“None of us saw this coming.”
Harry said nothing as the paramedics took Kelly away. Susan went with her. Kate remained at the command center.
She hugged Kate. “Mattie?”
Kate shook her head. “Of all that’s happened, I think that was truly unintentional.”
“How did you end up here?”
“That was Leo’s doing.”
“He’s in on this?”
“Only as an idiot. He got a call from Mort about the fair. He decided to exert his leadership over the location of Mort’s stands. He asked us to come with him because he still needed someone else to supply a backbone if he was going to face down the mighty Colonel Colter. We got here just as they were going after your daughter and her friends.”
“So there was no chance of turning around and leaving.”
“Not that Leo didn’t try. The moment he saw the guns, he bolted past us to get back to the car and tripped. He broke his ankle.” She looked for Susan. “I have a message for all of you. Mort says the whole farm is full of mines and IEDs.”
“We know,” Colin said. “We have a bomb disposal squad in the field now.”
“Not out there, here, right here.” She pointed around the main grounds of the farm. “He says there are still more than enough left after he let your unit clear the others. He has a special app on his smartphone. They’ve all been activated and he can set them off with a push of a button, one at a time or all at once. You are to send the helicopters and planes away, call in your snipers and lay down all your weapons. If any of us tries to leave or charge or stop him in any way, if anyone tries to call for more help, he will set off every bomb left on these grounds. We’re all hostages now.”
Joan looked at Shana, Lily and Donny. “Would he at least let us send the kids away?”
Harry answered, “From what he’s told me, I doubt it.”
Kate said, “He has some on each floor of the house. He showed them to us to prove his point. They’re all wired and prepped in there, too, according to him.”
“We have to get the kids out of here.”
“He has cameras everywhere. He’s been watching all of you since you got here and chuckling to himself the whole time.” She said to Joan, “He’s seriously pissed that you’re still alive.”
“Fancy that.”
Harry’s phone rang. “Mort, I’m glad you called. Thank you for releasing the hostages.” He nodded, looked at her and held out the phone.
She took it. “Sheriff McGowan.”
“You do love saying that, don’t you? Did Kate deliver my message?”
“She did.”
“Right about now, you probably wish you had taken those brats out the other way, don’t you?”
“I wish a lot of things had gone differently.”
“Of course, you never would have made it. This must feel like déjà vu to you.”
“More like act two.”
“I’m impressed, Sheriff. I was able to lead Harry and his colleagues around easily enough, but you figured it out.”
“You were at the Crowley farm.”
“Not personally, no, but I had a hand in giving you your scars.”
“Why do this? You served your country with distinction.”
“I’m still serving my country. I’m helping it make the hard choices facing it.”
“What do you want? Do you want me? I’ll come in and you can let everyone else go.”
“I knew you would offer yourself.”
“You’ve thought of everything. This has been an efficient operation from the get go.”
“Indeed it has. If not for your curious and meddlesome daughter and her friends, it would have begun as scheduled on Friday. But there was always enough flexibility in the plans to start earlier. Now, before you make some last desperate attempt to appeal to my last shred of humanity, you should know that both my men and I knew there would be casualties on both sides. We were prepared for that. We are still prepared for that; mostly your side now, though.”
“What is it you want from all this?”
“None of you are leaving here alive.”
She looked to the trees. “You don’t have to—”
“When I’m through, there will be plenty of job opportunities open in local law enforcement, and everyone’s going to blame Zemar Khan Marwat.”
She kept her tone as neutral and non-challenging as she could. “Do you think that’s still possible? Our superiors have been kept up to date on what’s happening. They know who is behind this.”
“Once you’re all dead, I have evidence in place that will convince them Marwat tried to frame me and my men. They will also be convinced that the rest of you were all duped. You will be remembered as hoodwinked simpletons and ironic victims of his terrorist bloodlust.”
“And you and your men will be the heroes.”
He chuckled. “In three minutes, I want to see the aerial surveillance gone. In five minutes, I want to see the snipers out of their perches. And be assured, we know where all of them are. When everyone’s present and accounted for, bring in the bomb squad. I will give you fifteen minutes to get them back and recall the National Guard and ATF squads pursuing my men, which, by the way, was by design. And remember, Sheriff McGowan, we can see all of you better than you can see us.” He broke the connection.
She managed to repeat Colter’s demands to Wally, Harry and Colin before she began trembling.
“We have to keep him talking,” Colin said.
“How the hell do we do that? We have nothing to negotiate with.”
Kate put an arm around her and took her aside.
“He’s insane. He’s convinced he’s going to come out of this the hero.” She clenched her fists. “I’d tear his head off if I could.”
The snipers began returning to the command center. The helicopters and planes flew away.
“Come with me.” Kate guided her toward the first aid area.
“What did you wa
nt to talk to me about?”
“It hardly matters now, but Susan and I wanted to talk to you about Zemar and Saleha. We were worried you might be getting suspicious and we wanted to put in a good word.” She chuckled harshly. “And I wanted to discuss my concerns about what Mort might be up to. I thought he was going to expose Zemar as Taliban, but not like this.”
Kate went to Susan, Kelly and Zemar at the ambulance holding Saleha. Zemar had his arm around Susan.
She went to Shana, Lily and Donny, who were still sitting in the shade under the trees.
Caesar raised his head from Shana’s lap for Joan to pet it before going back to sleep.
She sat beside Shana and put her arm around her.
“We’re screwed, aren’t we, mom?”
“It’s not over yet.”
“I’m sorry I stole that stupid wallet.”
She stroked Shana’s hair, her beautiful goddess, bold, courageous and overconfident. She lost her mother and father to a sick obsession. She lost Michael as they were reconciling. She lost Travis and twelve other colleagues, Craig and even Mattie to insane beliefs and violence. “I don’t care about a stupid wallet.”
“I love you, too, mom. How do we get out of this?”
“I don’t know. He has the whole farm mined with explosives and an app on his phone to set them all off whenever he wants. There’s no way we can do anything without him seeing us.”
Kate, Susan and Kelly came over and sat down on the grass.
“Excuse me, Sheriff,” Lily said, “did you just say he has an app on his phone?”
“Yes, to set off the explosives.”
“No he doesn’t.”
“What do you mean he doesn’t?”
She took out her phone. “Anything he has on that phone is DOA as soon as I call him.”
“How did you do that?”
“Believe me, Sheriff,” Donny said, “if she says she’s done it, she has.”
“What have you done? How could you possibly . . . ?”
Donny said, “You don’t know what happened at Lafleur and Thatcher, do you, Sheriff?”
“I remember,” Kelly said. “We never found out who did it.” She smiled at Lily. “Impressive.”
“It’s a gift.”
“What was impressive? This is all nonsense.”
“No, mom, it isn’t.” Shana kissed her cheek. “You need to listen to Lily. And don’t glaze over on her.”
Donny said, “Lily sent a worm through Dominion’s two private schools, the Lafleur Academy and the Thatcher Arts and Science Institute. It wiped out all their records.”
“I spoofed the school board’s email address and used that to send it as an attachment to both schools. It was crude, but they just opened it like it was a box of chocolates.”
“You never know what you’re going to get.”
“That gave me access to a peer-to-peer port and my worm just wriggled its way in, sealed the port behind it and started munching its way into a Root Directory. Then it was just a matter of inundating them with requests until the buffers overflowed and that led to a complete direct denial of service blitzkrieg. My worm then ate all their records and self-destructed.”
She looked at Shana.
“Mom, you’re glazing. I’ve seen her in action; trust me, she’s good.”
She looked at Donny.
“She’s really good; a total Ninja.”
She looked at Lily.
Lily pointed to her sweatshirt. “A security Ninja now; the best there is.”
Zemar arrived. “You’re Tarot, aren’t you?”
“That’s one of me.”
He said, “Sheriff, she is good.”
“Tell me what you’ve got.”
“The programmer working for Colter is brilliant, but conceited. He’s created two viruses. The one called Necrosis is designed to use a bot-net of computers to launch attacks on lots of different sites at the same time. Necrosis attacks chunks of code in their defenses: firewalls, virus detection and deletion programs, stuff like that.”
Kelly said, “It’s like HIV. It attacks the immune system of computers.”
“It creates openings for worms and Trojan horses to enter. Vigilante, his other program, is protection for Necrosis while it’s doing what it’s doing.”
She looked back at the people gathering at the command center. How receptive would Wally, Colin and Harry be to the prospect of a high school senior trying to save them with a counter-virus? What choice did they have?
“But he’s a total loser when it comes to protecting his own stuff. He should have kept them isolated until he was ready to launch, but he put them on the same hard drive with everything else two days ago to start the countdown. He did have defences in place, sure, encryption and deception, but they were simple, primitive and slow because he didn’t think anyone would come after him. With a little brute force, he was totally hacked by Chinese. I own him and his puny code. Necrosis and Vigilante are vulnerable until they launch at midnight Friday. I was able to penetrate both and set up a worm that will munch its way through them the moment they’re initiated. I call it Pox.”
“Hence,” Shana said, “they are DOA.”
“How?”
“The worm does to Necrosis what it would do to other programs. It turns it on itself. It will also stop Vigilante before it even starts. This guy linked all the phones on the farm, including Colter’s, with all the computers, which are linked to their website. Once I got access to one of them, I had access to all of them. Seriously, it wasn’t that difficult.”
Kelly said, “What do you think, Joan?”
“I don’t understand any this.”
Zemar said, “I do, and it should work.”
“You don’t have to understand it, mom,” Shana said. “You just need to know that our geek can totally beat up their geek. My best friend is the best weapon you have.”
“She’s the only weapon we have, if it will work.”
“It will,” Zemar said. “I wish I’d thought of it.”
Lily said, “I know I shouldn’t have, Sheriff McGowan, but they really pissed me off when they killed the elk.”
“I’ll overlook it this time. What about that app on his phone?”
“You mean this one?” Lily pressed some buttons on her phone and then held it up for her to see.
An image of a black button appeared on the screen.
“That’s even easier than the viruses. The moment you call him on my phone, Pox will infect all of his phones and computers through his wifi. I sent the first part of it just before they captured us. I’m ninety-five percent sure he won’t be able to do anything.”
“What about that five percent?”
Shana said, “We won’t have to worry about it for very long.”
Lily said, “I added a little extra feature into Pox.”
“Show me.”
Lily took her and Zemar aside. “See that button. That’s an image of the button on his app. I didn’t know what he was up to, so I included a little bit of code that would send his app back at him when he pushed the button, sort of like a feedback loop to fry his software.”
“You’re brilliant,” Zemar said, “and a bit scary.”
“Totally.”
“I gather it will do something else, too.”
“Once you call him, it will cause his phone to send out a spike that should fry everything on his wifi. It might trigger any explosives timers nearby if they’re connected to that wifi.”
“How nearby?”
“Only a few feet. I mean, he’d have to be standing right next to the receiver on the bomb for anything to happen. It’s not a very big spike, really, being that it’s just a cell phone signal. That’s the five percent uncertainty.”
“You’re sure about that?” She looked to Zemar.
“Theoretically,” he said, “it has a ninety-five percent chance of working.”
Lily held up her phone to show Joan a QR code. “That’s his trigger
. The trick is to get him to answer his cell phone not his hard line.”
Again she turned to Zemar for verification.
“Joan, if she says so, it’s so.”
“Perfect. Show me how to work it. Then get everybody together for a picture.”