She looked for an out, and saw nothing but trees blurring by on her right. She was trapped. And I helped him do it. Idiot. She seized the initiative, jerking the wheel to the left and slamming broadside into the truck in an attempt to get him out of position. Her little sedan did nothing to alter the truck’s trajectory. Instead, she ricocheted back into her lane, weaving left and right, making her manhandle the steering wheel to regain control. She felt the truck kiss the rear of her car and saw the driver crank the wheel to the right, forcing her rear end to begin to slide. She turned into the spin in a last desperate attempt to break the skid. She failed. A split second later, her car was rotating out of control. In a blur, she saw the truck rocket past and disappear as her car continued to spin into the right-side ditch. Her travel was brought to an abrupt halt when the front of the sedan hammered into a tree, causing her to crack her head into the driver’s-side window.
Woozy, she fumbled with the door latch, desperate to get the package from the rear seat and run. She had no plan other than to get away from here. Away from the bearded truck driver. A memory flitted across her consciousness. Her hanging from a beam, naked. The room freezing cold. A woman with a foreign accent hosing her down with water, demanding answers. A man behind the woman leering, waiting his turn. Not going back to The Hole.
She fell onto the ground, turned to the passenger door, and found herself facing the bearded man. Much bigger outside of the truck. Showing not a whit of compassion.
“Where is it?” he said.
She decided to keep to her cover, acting like she couldn’t believe this idiot had just run her off the road. Anything to buy herself some time.
“Are you crazy? You just wrecked my car! You’re not even asking if I’m all right. Jesus. I ought to call the police right now. You’d better have some insurance—”
He cut her off by slapping her hard across the face with a hand the size of a ham, knocking her to the ground.
“I don’t have time for this bullshit. Tell me where it is or I’m going to get rough. It’s over. Don’t make it any worse.”
On her knees, Jennifer looked up at him and stammered. He drew his hand back again, causing her to throw up her arms and shout, “Don’t!”
The bearded man smiled at her reaction and said, “Tell me.”
Jennifer dropped her head to her chest and began to cry. In between the sobs racking her body, she said, “It’s underneath the front passenger seat.”
The man turned away without another word, bringing a phone to his ear.
“It’s Radford. She’s done. I’ve got the package.”
He listened for a second, then said, “No, it didn’t end well. She’s sitting here crying like a baby. Or like a woman. I told you this whole experiment was stupid. No way is any girl going to be able to do operator shit. I’ll be back in ten minutes. Send someone out for her. The car’s pretty fucked up and I don’t think she can drive.”
Still making sobbing noises, Jennifer watched him circle around to the passenger side, tracking his movement like a predator. She waited until he bent over and disappeared from view before trotting lightly around the car. When she reached the door, she saw him facedown in the footwell, craning his neck to see beneath the seat, his right arm down in the well but his left arm holding on to the seat itself. Right in front of her. As if it were day one of combatives all over again and her instructor was giving her an easy gift.
4
Keshawn Jackson pulled next to the white coupé in the small parking area for substation 117. He stared at the vehicle for a second, making up his mind. The car was not supposed to be there. The substation was supposed to be deserted. For what he needed to do, it had to be deserted. On the other hand, he couldn’t come back here a second time. The Baltimore Gas and Electric Company truck he drove had a built-in GPS to facilitate recovery operations after a storm or other disaster. It would register him being here. Once could be explained away, but twice would invite scrutiny.
As an ex-con, he was a low-level worker. A cable dog. Someone who did the manual labor of getting power back on, supporting the more experienced linemen, not someone who had any reason to be at substation 117.
It dawned on him that he was about to break the law for the first time in over five years. He felt no shame. Before his job at BGE, he had been a gang member and a career petty criminal, in and out of jail for everything from drugs to assault with a deadly weapon. His last stint had been at the infamous Attica prison in New York, where he had found religion. As for many inmates before, God had saved his soul. He had identified what had been wrong with his previous life and found a reason to belong. And a reason to blame. Since then, he’d been on the straight and narrow, a model citizen, waiting to give back something for what his newfound faith had given to him. There were three others from his prison prayer group just like him, working in electrical companies in Washington, D.C., Pennsylvania, and Virginia.
Making up his mind, he decided to go inside the small concrete-block house. He was in his BGE uniform, so he wouldn’t be completely out of place. If he saw someone, he’d throw out an excuse and leave. If not, he’d get to work.
He dialed the combination on the chain-link gate and passed through, walking underneath the lines heading in and out and ignoring the myriad of transformers. What he wanted was inside the building. Substation 117 was one of a handful that had a server inside that allowed access into the BGE network. They were sprinkled throughout the service area to allow monitoring of the grid without having to travel to a central control node.
He scanned the facility inside the fence line, but didn’t see a soul. Maybe the guy just parked here and went somewhere else, he thought, although the chances of that were unlikely, since the substation was out in the boonies, in a rural area west of Baltimore, Maryland. Not a whole lot of places to go from here.
He punched in the combination on the metal door and entered the concrete structure. It was small, only two rooms with a closet. Most of the area was filled with analog equipment and circuit breakers to pull the substation off-line in an emergency. He didn’t see anyone inside the building, which caused him to let out his breath. He also didn’t see the server, which made him wonder if his information had been wrong. He opened the closet door and smiled. Inside on a desk was a normal-looking desktop computer. The screen was off, but he knew it was running by the blinking hard-drive light. He looked around once more, then pulled out a thumb drive and stuck it into a USB port.
He had no expertise at all in what he was doing, but then again, he didn’t need any. His contact from the prayer group had told him to simply stick in the thumb drive and it would do the work. The mass hysteria and multiple news reports of cyber threats and the vulnerability of the U.S. system to hackers had caused a phalanx of firewalls and other security measures to be implemented in the BGE power grid. All were directed outward, at the access points to the Internet, where the threat was supposed to live. Nothing had been done to protect from an attack on the inside, using BGE’s own hardware. A lesson they would learn the hard way.
Watching the erratic blinking LED on the thumb drive, Keshawn was startled by light spilling in from the outside door. Before he could react, he heard, “Hey, what are you doing?”
He turned around and saw a smallish man in a coat and tie. Shit. Management.