“Hell if I know,” Kook said.
“It doesn’t matter,” Adam said. “Look. The cameras are all over the banners. He’s the story now. Banks is out of the shadows. They’re totally sucking up the information.”
“No.” Moses felt his blood draining from him as he realized what he’d been too impassioned to see before. “We screwed up.”
“Bullshit. It went perfect,” Kook said.
“No.” Moses pressed his hands against his forehead in frustration. The scope of his failure was too horrifying to accept. “We did it wrong.”
Simon Banks was guiding his daughter out of the factory. He was laughing. He was smiling at his daughter, and laughing, and completely unfazed by the event that they’d engineered. Another of Kook’s spy eyes picked them up outside the factory, tracking the pair as they climbed into a Williams & Crowe SUV. The last glimpse Moses got of Simon Banks was of the man looking smugly self-satisfied as he stared back at the still-smoking building, right before he closed the door and let Williams & Crowe whisk him away.
“We screwed up. We completely screwed up.”
“But look at all the coverage we’re getting,” Tank protested.
“But that’s just the thing: Banks isn’t the story,” Moses said, tapping the screen. “We are. The crazy kids who do crazy things.”
“Crazy cool things,” Kook said.
“No. Just crazy. We look bug nuts crazy.” He stared at all the banners, finally seeing what he’d been blind to. He’d walked right into the same playbook the Doubt Factory used every day. Sincerity always loses. You can’t shake up the status quo.
His uncle used to say there was a fine line between clever and stupid. Whatever scam you came up with needed to be bulletproof.
To that, Moses silently added another dictum: There’s a fine line between clever and crazy.
“We look like we’re straight out of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest or something. We might as well be that old guy who lived in the cabin in Montana and wrote those goofy manifestos.”
“Ted Kaczynski. The Unabomber,” Cynthia said.
“Yeah, him. All they have to do is associate us with his manifesto or about a thousand Earth Firster things. The Radical Environmental Agenda or some shit. Occupy Wall Street loony tunes.”
Cynthia groaned as she got it. “They’ll frame the story around us. Talk about how sad it is that we don’t have a mental health system. Like the Sandy Hook shootings. NRA used that tactic.”
“Yeah, we screwed up. We just became the story, instead of the Doubt Factory. Now Simon Banks is just an innocent victim, and we’re a bunch of crazy-ass lunatics.”
Moses watched Alix and her father driving away. The memory of Simon Banks smiling as he climbed into the SUV burned in Moses’s brain.
“We blew it,” Moses said. “We totally blew it.”
PART 2
26
ALIX SAT IN AP CHEM, staring out at the sunshine. Another hot spring day, with everyone wilting and complaining that for a rich school, Seitz ought to be able to figure out how to get its AC right. All of them sticky and bored in the heat, and all of them stuck in neutral, waiting for the clock to run out and real life to start.
Sophie texted her under the table. GOING OUT. YOU WANT TO?
Sure.
Whatever.
Cynthia was gone.
Moses hadn’t been seen again.
2.0 had disappeared entirely, like they’d evaporated into the hot spring sunshine. Poof, gone. A strange hallucination that left everyone shaken but fundamentally unchanged.
Alix thought about the whole thing often. She couldn’t stop thinking about the moment when she’d handed the USB stick to her father. The moment when she’d been on the verge of doing something dangerous and against the grain, and then stopped short. The moment when she decided not to go play in the traffic.
Safe, because she loved her family.
Safe.
She couldn’t help wondering what might have happened. If there were an alternate-reality version of Alix Banks who’d plugged that USB stick into her father’s computer and unleashed the fury of the universe.
Maybe that Alix had ended up as a smashed hood ornament on the front of a Lexus, but this one was fine.
Shaken, but fine.
Shaken, until, after a little while, she shook the fear off. And then what did she have? An odd little story that she was starting to doubt more and more as time passed. There wasn’t even anything she could point to to say that her near miss with the mysterious-dangerous-whatever had even been real. 2.0 was gone.
Not a trace.
Poof! Gone!
A magic trick.
Now you see it, now you don’t.
It pissed the FBI off, royally.
Not only had Williams & Crowe failed to notify them that they were about to go after a target of FBI interest, but they’d lost them entirely. Terrorist cells weren’t supposed to just evaporate into thin air, and yet 2.0 had managed the impossible. Pictures of Moses and Cynthia circulated. A few blurry photos from the rave had been recovered, showing Adam, the beautiful blond DJ. And then… nothing. Every lead was a dead end.
Cynthia turned out to be a ghost: Stolen SSN, false history, a PO box for an address. Surveillance tapes never seemed to catch any of them.
Moses showed up on a couple of tapes from when he’d punched the headmaster, but even then he always seemed to know which way to turn his back so that it was impossible to get a clear look at his face.
Moses was a phantom. Cynthia was the most solid lead they had, and she petered out. Maybe her father really had worked in tech and done data mining. Maybe she really had been accepted to Stanford. Or maybe it was all lies, because no one could dig up a likeness. And the rest of them?
A kid whose aunt worked with asbestos? No good records.
Some gutter punk girl? You could find them on every street in every city in America.
Some Latino foster kid with an asthma problem? Nobody even bothered to keep track.
Of course, the FBI went over the factory with a fine forensic comb, but it had been full of human detritus from the huge rave that 2.0 had thrown. If there was decent physical evidence of anything at all, it was hopelessly obscured. What they did come up with were a lot of banners and a whole host of surveillance cameras that seemed to observe every angle of the factory.
The FBI tech who had studied them reported that they’d been sending encrypted signals to… nothing at all. Some kind of nearby local network that no longer existed. Still, they’d managed to match a pattern and connected to another local net that led onto another—link after link in an anonymous chain that eventually dead-ended in Estonia, and left investigators pulling their hair in frustration. They had nothing.
Well, rats. They had a lot of rats. 2.0 had left the rats with a sign that said FREE TO GOOD HOME. Those were the rats that Alix had seen at the rave. It turned out that they’d been heisted from the same testing facility as the ones 2.0 had used in the school. A private lab that had been involved in evaluating Tank’s asthma drug, the one that supposedly caused comas.
Williams & Crowe had confiscated the rats as evidence, along with several vats of Azicort, the bronchial dilator, and a long screed from 2.0 about pharmaceutical companies doing suspect testing. According to the banners, the rats in question were being used by George Saamsi and Kimball-Geier to prove Azicort was a safe substance suitable for use on chronic asthma.
It looked as though the rats had been meant to be released in another massive wave, reminiscent of the prank at Seitz, but by the time the cages had opened, most of the rats had already died of a different kind of respiratory failure—choking to death on pepper spray and tear gas.