Plastic Smile (Russell's Attic Book 4) (11 page)

I was right on top of the guard, but dollars to doughnuts he wouldn’t notice. Nobody ever looked up.

As I neared the guardhouse I fed in some deceleration, braking myself until I’d hit the barest tiptoe when I stepped onto the guardhouse roof.

“Is he looking away?” I whispered.

“Still on the monitors,” Checker said.

I crept soundlessly to the edge of the roof and dropped. On the street side of the guardhouse, I stayed curled below the windows for one more moment, listening, and then moved away at a crouch.

“Am I good?” I asked.

“He’s looking up at the building now. No way he sees the street.”

I straightened up and sprinted back to the car.

Pilar was waiting inside, in the passenger seat. She jumped a mile when I knocked on the window and immediately groped for the unlock button. “Oh, thank God!” she said as soon as I opened the driver’s door. “I didn’t see you coming. I was so worried. You were supposed to be out ahead of me.”

“It got hot,” I said.

Her eyes widened. “It did? Oh my gosh, it’s probably better I didn’t know that. What happened?”

“Keys, Pilar.”

“Oh! Right!”

She dug them out and handed them to me. I tried to start the car, but when I turned the key, nothing happened.

“You forgot to fix the engine,” Pilar said, unnecessarily.

Fuck. I must be more rattled than I thought.

Or maybe Checker had it right, and I wasn’t thinking straight at all.

Chapter 10

I hung up
with Checker and took out the earpiece, over his protests. I didn’t want him ranting at me, especially if he was right. Pilar kept asking me questions about what had happened, her hands twisting with way more nervousness than she’d exhibited before the operation, but I put her off.

I didn’t feel like explaining. Even to myself.

Especially to myself.

I dropped Pilar off at Checker’s house and sped away without going in. Avoiding Checker forever wasn’t an option—I’d need his help on the devices soon enough—but I could be petty for one night.

By early the next morning, however, I was sitting on the floor surrounded by pages of technical specs and the guts of the Arkacite device, and feeling like I’d just banged my head into the wall about three dozen times. In order for my calibrated net to work, I needed to deploy hundreds of the things all over LA in extremely specific locations, which meant miniaturizing the one I’d stolen from the warehouse. I’d been able to figure out how each component worked without much trouble—circuits were little more than Boolean algebra made exponential—but making the pieces themselves
smaller—

I was a mathematician, not an engineer.

I’d even broken down and emailed Checker a copy of the specs in the middle of the night, but morning had rolled around without a reply from him, which was…unusual. Very unusual. His responses tended to be improbably instantaneous.

I half-wondered if he was ignoring me. Maybe it was comeuppance for me ignoring
him
for so long and then contradicting him on a mission.

I pushed the gutted hardware aside and picked up the specs again. The mathematical pathways were so clear to me, including their loops and redundancies. I
should
be able to condense it all. I
could
condense it all, theoretically, but the theory wasn’t good enough. What I wanted to do was possible according to the laws of physics, but the necessary knowledge of circuits and wires just wasn’t in my head—hell, the components I’d need might not even exist, for all I knew about electronics.

A skinny black girl handed me a box the size of a cigarette pack, circuits and wires splaying out the sides.

“What does it do?”

Laughter from her, with a savage edge. “Go find out.”

I shook off the apparition.

My phone buzzed. Finally.

NOT A HWARE GUY,
Checker’s text said with uncharacteristic terseness—yeah, he must still be mad.
CAN ASK ARND IF U WANT.

Damn. Checker was good enough at basic hardware that I tended to forget he identified way more on the bits-and-bytes side of things. And I wasn’t keen on involving someone else.

I tossed my phone in my hand, thoroughly frustrated.

Wait.
Wait.

My whole focus went to the mobile phone in my hand. I examined it closely, then got up, walked over to the wall, and smashed it against the corner. The case broke open neatly along the seams.

I looked back to the pieces of the Arkacite device strewn on the floor. A massive jumble of circuitry, hiding the simplicity of what it did. Arkacite had used it to deal with the device’s problems in a language they understood—but I didn’t need
their
language if I could translate it into mine.

The heart of the hardware was simple. All I needed was the ability to send signals—a lot of signals. The Arkacite device had ponderous engineering in place for the directionality and calibration problems they’d been trying to counter, but I didn’t need any of that—
if
I had enough point sources in my grid.

A dense enough net, with every device able to reach out and sense the position of every other one…a net that was able to adjust itself according to what it found, according to its place in time and space…and all that was left was math.

Not programming or hardware. Just math.

I gazed down at the split-open cell phone for another few seconds, then laid out its guts next to the pieces of the Arkacite device and pulled over some old academic journals to scribble on the backs. If I cut all the inputs to a subliminal audio frequency and then fed in the density of smartphones in Los Angeles…pseudocode spiraled out from my pen, structuring the logic such an app would need. GPS variables, density of other phones as a proxy to population…raise or lower the signals instantly, according to a hair trigger…I sat and wrote, sprawled and wrote, wrote and wrote and wrote. The algorithm was mathematically complex enough Arkacite never would have jigsawed it together from their testing data, but it would be beautifully simple from a coding point of view.

I hoped.

Shit. I scrawled a box at the end of the completed program outline and sat back on my heels. Now I didn’t need a hardware guy, I needed a software one—someone who could transform my mathematical outline into actual programming and then, well, package it into an app, or whatever software engineers did.

I needed Checker. As I’d known I would, in some fashion. I needed to give him all this and discuss it with him and ask what he needed to make it happen, which meant I had to go to the Hole, where I was going to get an earful of a lecture about the night before.

It was mid-afternoon. I put my phone together and checked in with Arthur via text rather than calling so he couldn’t pester me with questions about Simon—I had no illusions about Checker keeping the previous night’s incident to himself. Then I grabbed my stack of pseudocode and reluctantly drove back to Van Nuys. I was fully braced for Checker to lay into me immediately about stupid risks, possibly mixed in with a scolding about not telling Pilar what had gone down.

Instead, he jerked around when I came into his computer cave as if he hadn’t already seen me coming on his security cameras.

“Cas,” he said, his hands slipping and dropping the tablet he’d been holding. It clattered to the floor, but he didn’t seem to notice. “Hey. Hey.”

“Uh, hi,” I said. “I have a plan. Can you build a smartphone app out of this?” I tossed the sheaf of pseudocode on his keyboard.

I was expecting more objections, but instead he just pushed up his glasses and started reading. “This doesn’t look too bad, actually. Is it—um. You figured out how to use cell phones for it.”

It wasn’t really a question, but I answered anyway. “Yup. Brilliant, huh? Los Angeles has so many phones; I can lose all the other junk the Signet Devices needed. This can run in secret on everyone’s smartphones—
everyone’s,
everyone who has one—and it’ll adjust in real time according to the algorithm and blanket the whole city. Keep everybody safe and calm.”

He twitched at that, and I waited for him to protest again, but he didn’t. He also wasn’t looking at me.

The silence stretched out.

“I’ll start working on it,” Checker said, still avoiding my gaze. “How, um. How are you going to get this onto the phones?”

“I need some way to hack the cell network. I figured you were the one to ask about that.”

He seemed to get some of his sarcastic vigor back then. “You know, usually when people use the word ‘hack’ they’re
way
oversimplifying. Sadly, in the case of our cellular network, these days it actually is that easy.”

“Really? How?”

“You want something that will eventually reach almost the whole LA population? Probably the best way would be baseband hacking—hitting the phone radio processors with a fake tower signal. This used to be a lot harder, but now it’s as simple as buying some hotspot boxes and reconfiguring them. Still, in order to make it remotely feasible to engage a critical density of cell phones, you’ll have to set a lot of the things—I’ll get you all the numbers, but you’ll have to figure out for yourself if you can place enough of them to reach download saturation as people’s phones move in and out of range.”

“Sounds good,” I said. “What
is
the range?”

“About two hundred meters, if I remember right?”

The estimates slotted in for me lightning fast. I wouldn’t be able to cover close to all of LA, but I wouldn’t have to. I just needed enough high-population areas. Heavily used freeway interchanges, where people would be sitting in traffic while their phones downloaded my program…the canyon roads, the airport…

“Doing this sort of thing is highly illegal, of course, but it’s ridiculously straightforward,” Checker continued. “It’s the same tech the government uses for StingRay surveillance—did you know the LAPD alone has used that to spy on hundreds of citizens, all without a warrant? Anyway, we’ll have to think about power consumption, but I’m guessing what with you being you, that’s not going to be a huge stumbling block to steal. Depending on how many you want, we can probably rig them for you in a weekend.”

“Cool,” I said. “Thanks. Sounds perfect.” It was, in fact, exactly what I needed.

But Checker was neither celebrating such an elegant solution with me nor arguing with me about why I shouldn’t do it.

We had fallen into an awkward stillness again. I didn’t know what to think. When Checker fought with me, he
fought:
he was loud and blunt and opinionated.

Not this stilted, muted interaction.

“What happened with Simon?” I said, when the silence had become too uncomfortable. “Did you track him on the cameras after I left?” I didn’t
want
to invite the lecture of doom, but I did want to know—and Checker was acting way too strange for my tastes.

Was this the sort of thing Rio had noticed in me, after Dawna had influenced me? Could Simon have gotten to Checker in a way I was able to notice? Rio had turned out to be immune to telepathic influence, though…

“What?” Checker straightened and became a little more animated again. “Right. Simon. Right. Uh, it’s totally weird. He didn’t appear on any cameras at all after I saw him with you.”

“That’s impossible,” I said.

“I know. When you left him, it was dark where he was. I watched for the rest of the night for him to pop up elsewhere, but nothing. Then once the sun rose, I checked everywhere. He wasn’t on any of the cameras at all.”

“Impossible,” I said again. “Those things covered the whole property.” The security map rose in my mind’s eye, the cameras’ fields of view overlapping.

“I
know,”
Checker said. “But then I thought, well—he didn’t know you’d directed me to cover his exit. We assumed he’d sneak out and maybe modify the guard’s memory or whatever, but…he didn’t know he wasn’t on the monitors.”

“So? Why would he care either way if he was?” It hadn’t been
his
heist to protect, and the man had superpowers, so it wasn’t like he would’ve gone down for the crime by accident.

“Maybe he just wanted to avoid questions? I don’t know. But if he can make himself unnoticeable—Cas, what if that’s what he did after you left him? Just make himself unnoticeable?”

“They’re
cameras,”
I said. “He can’t impact cameras. It’s human psychology these guys are experts in.”

“And I think he’s on the cameras,” Checker said. “I think he’s on the cameras and
I can’t see him.”

Well. That was disturbing in a variety of ways.

“Run some sort of program or something that recognizes humans,” I said. “Have the computer analyze the footage.”

“You think I didn’t try that? I get three results, since I scrubbed you. And when I try to bring them up, I get Pilar, the guard, and an empty hallway. Cas, I don’t think he’s tricking the computer; I think whatever he’s doing is tricking anybody who looks at the footage before we can see him. You told Arthur he kept going on about permission, right? What if he didn’t want to alter the guard’s memory directly, and this was his way of taking care of both the guard and the cameras?”

“This
is
altering us directly,” I said. “I don’t buy that ‘not an exact science’ bullshit—he just brainwashed the guard
and
you
and
me!”

“I don’t claim to know how it works,” Checker said. “I’m just telling you what I know, okay?”

He trailed off. The room got quiet again.

Checker
never
got quiet.

“What is wrong with you?” I said.

“What? Nothing!” He moved his hand so fast one of his keyboards banged.

“Okay,” I answered, chewing the word slowly. “Okay. So you’ll get everything we need for the cell phone hacking for me? And translate my program into computer-speak?”

“Yeah, uh. Sure.”

More silence.

“So, what annoying past-life questions are you going to pester me with today?” I tried, as a last resort.

“Oh. Right,” he said. “Um, none. I mean, I’m not. Take the day off.”

“You’re not? You’ve been prodding and prying every chance you get and now you’ve got nothing? That’s a nice change.”