Genius--The Revolution Read online

  PART TWO

  INTO THE FUTURE

  14. Rex

  4 DAYS UNTIL SHIVA

  We left Cai’s apartment around four in the morning.

  Her parents were awake and sad to be seeing her go so soon.

  But they seemed to understand; this thing wasn’t over.

  Mr. Zhang knew Kiran needed to be stopped and we were the only ones who could do it. We’d freed him. We’d taken down Terminal. Kiran was next.

  Meeting Cai’s parents was wonderful.

  Truth is: I was more anxious when that apartment door opened than I was when I’d hacked into the Game. Running from the police has nothing on the heart-pounding anxiety of meeting your girlfriend’s folks. I fully expected her dad to give me the third degree, but they were sweet and, above all, understanding.

  The way they reacted, the way they listened, Cai couldn’t have had better parents—even though they were protective, they saw her for who she truly is and encouraged her to embrace that inner rebelliousness.

  Of course, it only reminded me that I needed to see my parents.

  They knew Teo was okay, that I’d found him.

  But now they were going to actually see him again.

  Mental note: Prepare for some emotional fireworks.

  After a last round of good-byes to Cai’s parents, we snagged a cab to Beijing Capital International Airport. I wasn’t the only one jazzed. Tunde was a talkative ball of nerves. Teo bounced his left knee the entire drive.

  “What’s first?” I asked the team as we pulled up to our departure gate.

  “Reconnaissance,” Cai said. “We need eyes on that black box.”

  “Do we have any idea where Kiran is?” Tunde asked.

  “From what I can tell,” Teo said, swiping through screens on his cell, “he’s gone underground. No social media, no messaging. I saw something from an OndScan account where the company praised the takedown of Terminal and mentioned that Kiran was taking a brief vacation. But that’s it.”

  “Do you think he is in Mexico City?” Tunde asked.

  “We’ll find out…,” I said.

  ULTRA met us at the ticketing counter. Javiera, Ivan, and Stella looked exhausted—big bags under their eyes.

  Before I could even ask, Javiera said, “We made our safe house, but it was crashed at two a.m. by the cops. We’ve been up since then, cabs, trains, on foot. I think we’re all going to be passed out before the plane even takes off.”

  “Terminal’s down and out,” Teo said. “Who do you think got to you?”

  “Kiran,” Ivan said. “He even sent us a lovely message.”

  Stella produced a tablet computer from her bag and opened a video message she’d received via an anonymous chat app. She pressed play, and there was our old friend again, wearing only designer clothes and smiling with too-perfect teeth. Even though Kiran looked just as together as always, just as much the guru, there was a heaviness that had sunk into his eyes. A strain. I was happy to think that maybe the LODGE and I had put it there.

  “Hey, ULTRA,” Kiran said. “I’ve been hearing rumors that you’re running around now with the LODGE. I’m impressed. It’s like a superhero team up or something—two groups of incredibly gifted but delusional young people who are under the misguided impression that I’m out to ruin the world. I have some breaking news for you: Terminal is no more. The real bad guys are out of the game, so to speak. Yet I have no doubt that you’re not going to abandon your mission. Don’t worry. I’ll keep making it as entertaining as possible. Say hi to Painted Wolf for me.”

  The video stopped and went to black.

  “I see he isn’t any less a jerk than before,” I said.

  “He’s worried,” Cai said. “I can read it in his face. He tried to play off Terminal’s being arrested as nothing major. But it has him spooked. We have the upper hand right now; if we can hit the black box lab quickly, we’ll leave him spinning. And that is exactly where we want him.”

  While I wasn’t as confident as Cai, I got a similar sense.

  Tunde, as usual, wasn’t as convinced.

  “Maybe this is what he wants us to think?” Tunde said. “We cannot be too sure with Kiran. He has surprised us too many times.”

  * * *

  Passing through security with no problems felt … off.

  This shouldn’t be this easy.

  It took a good half hour, and the whole time I was overly conscious of my body language and where I was looking. There were numerous Chinese police and military milling about, but for the most part they ignored us; just another round of tourists making their way out of the country. I was stunned. Whatever mojo Kiran had pulled to ghost out our identities made us better than invisible. We could truly hide in plain sight.

  An hour later, we were on the plane.

  I sat beside Teo and Cai. Tunde joined Javiera and Stella a half-dozen rows behind us. Ivan was consigned to a seat at the back of the plane. He didn’t seem to mind; he was eager to sleep for most of the twenty-plus-hour flight ahead.

  We didn’t talk as the plane taxied and took off.

  All of us were lost in thoughts of what was to come next.

  I looked out the window at the dizzying expanse of the city.

  Cai took my hand and squeezed it.

  “So what happens next?” I asked.

  “We keep going,” Cai replied.

  “And after that?”

  “Hard to say,” she said. “You’re assuming it all works out, that we stop Kiran and make everything right. It’s hard for me to think more than two steps ahead at this point.”

  “Well, what are the two steps you see?”

  Cai glanced over at Tunde. He’d fallen asleep.

  “We get to Mexico City,” she said. “There, we’ll work with ULTRA to find a way into this last black box lab, and then we see where those clues lead us. If ULTRA is right, we find Kiran and we confront him.”

  I squeezed Cai’s hand. “Easy.”

  She laughed.

  “I can’t imagine going back to how things were before all this,” I said. “Being in school, sitting at a desk, bored out of my mind, and then just … I don’t know if I can sit back and watch the world go by anymore. I feel like I have to be involved now, on every level.”

  “You were involved before, Rex. You just didn’t see it.”

  “What do you mean? I wasn’t racing around the world.”

  Cai said, “All that coding you did for WALKABOUT, the forums, the sites, the social media, you were everywhere. Maybe you were doing it all from your laptop or your cell phone, but you were doing it. Think about everyone we’ve met. Even if they didn’t know your name or your face, they understood what you were working for. I know what you mean, seeing all this, being exposed to the world, it changes you. But I don’t think things are really going to be that different when we get home.”

  “Doesn’t feel that way.”

  “You’ll see.” Cai smiled.

  14.1

  Seven thousand miles and a day and a half later, we were at a café on the corner of Calle Xicotencatl and Ignacio Allende in Mexico City.

  Tunde’s people, his family, were all safe.

  Cai’s father was out of jail, his record clear.

  I was in the country of my ancestors. Even though I was desperate to see my parents and bring Teo back into the fold, we couldn’t make contact with them yet. Kiran’s message made it clear we were going to be on his radar soon—if we weren’t already. We had to get this done as soon as possible.

  Across the street was one of Kiran’s black box labs.

  Here’s where it all goes down, good or bad.…

  Despite the fact that there were seven of us huddled around a café table only one hundred yards away, Cai seemed convinced we didn’t stand out. The plaza was crazy crowded, and there were tourists of every stripe around.

  The black box lab building was a simple brick affair with very few windows. Those that existed were blacked out. The place re
sembled a three-story jail more than anything. Because it was so nondescript, getting an idea of what was inside it was going to be particularly tricky.

  Good news was: We had more hands than ever.

  Cai said, “Plan’s simple: If this lab is where the Shiva program will be launched from, we need to see inside it. Since we don’t have time to set up a proper surveillance system, we’re going to have to wing it. We need to intercept their communications externally and get whatever data internally that we can.”

  “What’re we thinking?” I asked the others.

  “I am thinking there is an amazing communications array on that tall building beside the lab,” Tunde said, pointing to the roof of an office building. He was right; there was a smorgasbord of satellite dishes and antennae on the roof. Many of the cables leading to and from the array led directly, though surreptitiously, to the black box lab—a clever rerouting to distract potential spies.

  Tunde continued: “I may be mistaken, but from what I can see from here, it appears as though this communications array belongs to our friend and his brain trust. If we can tap into it, we can tap into their systems.”

  “Excellent,” I said. “Cai, Ivan, how we feeling?”

  “Beautiful,” Ivan said.

  “Let’s do it,” I said.

  Half an hour and fifteen flights of stairs later, we were on the roof of the building next to the black box lab. Tunde and Stella looked over the satellite array and walked us through the details of how they’d gain access to the lab’s feed.

  It was complicated, and we left Tunde and Stella to figure it out.

  Rooftop satellite

  Twenty-two minutes later, they had it.

  They were able to redirect the busy stream of information coming from the black box lab to a program on Javiera’s cell phone. That way she and I could get a look at the stream of data as it zipped up into space and then back down to the rest of the brain trust and Kiran … wherever he actually was.

  What we saw was not pretty.

  “They’re preparing the fourth virus,” Javiera said, eyes on the screen. “All the traffic running in and out of that place is focused on building a system of back doors to let the virus loose. Literally every computer in there is targeted for that one purpose. Kiran’s going for broke.”

  “How about security?” I asked.

  “The lab’s running 4096-bit RSA encryption, not easy to crack.”

  Javiera looked up from the screen at the team.

  “So maybe we do a side-channel attack with acoustic cryptanalysis,” I said. “We turn on some of the microphones inside that place, listen in on the high-pitch frequencies that computers use to decrypt data, and we can hack them.”

  “Technically possible,” Javiera said, “but not doable with our time frame.”

  “It would take us days to build that sort of setup,” Stella added.

  “We don’t have days,” Cai said, hammering it home.

  “We know the launch is imminent,” Javiera said.

  “And we cannot do anything from here?” Tunde asked.

  “Not this way,” Javiera said, “but…”

  Then she turned and looked at me.

  14.2

  It was costume time.

  We stopped by a clothing store a few blocks from the black box lab and scored an outfit for me. It was my turn to play the Painted Wolf role.

  While Cai was in her full Wolf regalia, all the classic stuff she’d picked up at home, and looked pretty badass in a leather jacket, I wasn’t looking nearly so cool.

  For me, the dress code was nerdy.

  I needed to look as black box brain trust-y as possible—bright colors, a hip jacket, and glasses (outfitted with several cameras, of course). I even put my hair up in a high ponytail and put on a rather effective fake goatee Cai had assembled from her hairpieces. Cai laughed the first time she saw it. I gave her a dirty look and she corrected herself.

  “It’s cute,” she said.

  Cute or not, it had to work.

  I was going into the lab for some firsthand recon.

  Security was crazy tight on the array—the brain trust kids in the Mexico City black box lab had done some insane work keeping their outgoing signal secure. The only way we were going to get meaningful intel on Shiva was from inside the lab. And since I’d actually worked in the Kolkata black box lab, I was the best one to go in.

  The rest of the crew, the LODGE and ULTRA, waited for me a couple blocks away as I walked over to the black box lab solo. I’ll admit: I was nervous.

  I hoped my sweat wouldn’t loosen the glue on my goatee.

  I stepped up to the front door with a tiny earpiece in my left ear.

  The LODGE was on the other end.

  “There are cameras mounted on the exterior,” Cai said to me through the earpiece. “You can defeat the facial recognition software, but you’ll need to talk fast. We’ve confirmed the name of a software engineer inside. He’s Carson.”

  “Carson,” I repeated. “I’m on it. No problem.”

  Truth is: My guts were churning.

  I knocked on the front door. It had no doorknob, no peephole. Just a metal door set into a metal frame. There was no answer. So I knocked again. This time, there was a squeal of metal as locks disengaged and the door slid open.

  A young woman with oversized glasses stood there staring at me.

  “Yes?” she said, irritated.

  In Spanish, I said: “So sorry to interrupt, but I need—”

  “Do you speak English?” the young woman cut me off.

  I put on my best, thickest Mexican accent. “Yes,” I said. “I need to talk to Carson. It’s very important and concerns what happened in China.”

  Oversized Glasses looked very confused.

  “Um…” She wasn’t exactly sure how to respond.

  I’d caught her off guard. The plan was working.

  “You weren’t expecting me?” I asked. “No surprise there, considering what’s been going on. Tell Carson I’m from the Beijing office. I’m sure you heard about what happened, correct?”

  She shook her head.

  “You didn’t?” I feigned shock. “Well, I really need to talk to Carson now.”

  The young woman stood there, flustered, unsure of what to do next.

  “What is your name?” I asked her.

  “Um … N-Nicole,” she stammered.

  “Good, Nicole. Please get me Carson stat.”

  “I’m afraid that won’t be possible,” Nicole said, mechanically repeating something she’d probably been trained to say. “This is a restricted facility, and you’ll need authorization to get any farther. If you’re really—”

  “This lab’s been compromised,” I interrupted. “It’s incredibly important. I need to come in now. You can explain to Kiran why you kept me waiting.”

  As Nicole waffled, I stepped past her inside.

  14.3

  I walked out of the heat and into a maelstrom.

  “Nicely done,” Cai said into my earpiece.

  “Bravo,” Tunde added.

  “Could’ve been better,” Teo said.

  “Yeah, yeah,” I whispered back. “Now, shush.”

  ULTRA was right. The Mexico City black box lab certainly looked like Kiran’s last-ditch attempt to launch his Shiva and Rama programs.

  I think beehive is an appropriate description.

  The Kolkata black box lab was lightly staffed compared to the crowd I found myself among. There were well over a hundred brain trust prodigies running back and forth, crazily, around the Mexico City lab. And unlike Beijing’s clever analog library, this place was packed with computers and servers.

  It truly was a hub. If there was another virus like the one we’d intercepted, this would be the place to launch it from.

  Nicole scrambled behind me, tugging at my shoulder, trying to get me to listen. “There’s procedure that needs to be followed,” she continued. “Kiran was very strict about—”

 
“So is Carson here?” I asked.

  “He’s in a meeting,” Nicole said.

  I stopped in the middle of a lobby.

  “Then I guess you’re going to have to interrupt it,” I said. “While you’re at it, I’ll need a rundown of everything you’re doing securitywise. All the software, whatever hardware you have in place.”

  “I don’t have—”

  “Can you get it?”

  Nicole wasn’t sure how to reply.

  Finally, she said, “Give me two minutes.”

  I watched as Nicole headed up a nearby staircase, eyeing me the whole while. I looked at my watch, pretending to be seriously annoyed. As soon as she vanished into an upstairs room, I took a good look around the three-story building. It had an open interior with workstations lining the sides on each floor. Staircases branched up and down, winding around like some M. C. Escher building.

  If the architecture wasn’t wild enough, the mood of the place was total panic.

  And that panic provided me with some cover.

  I ducked over to an unoccupied computer terminal in a corner. I couldn’t use the passcodes I’d been given in India to log in ’cause that would tip off Kiran something fierce. Instead, I hacked my way in. Took a good thirty seconds, but it didn’t take me much longer than that to find hints of what I was looking for.

  The Shiva program was indeed inside the lab, but …

  “You see what I see?” I asked the rest of the team.

  I angled my glasses so they could see the screen I was looking at.

  On the monitor in front of me was a running log of the black box lab system’s programs. They were all piecemeal. No one program was running by itself; they were all tied into each other like lines in a spider’s web.

  “I am not sure what it is we are looking at,” Tunde said. “Explain it.”

  “They’re running a clever system that’s broken up every piece of software associated with Shiva and intertwined it with something else,” I whispered. “You pull one piece, you pull them all. But the most important thing is this.…”

  I pointed to a line of code on the screen.

  “Shiva is housed here but launched from somewhere else,” I said. “I’m not going to have enough time right now to figure out exactly where that is. We need to come back here and bust this thing wide open.”