“That’s them!” the barista says.

And all hell really breaks loose.

When it’s all settled, Toto and me are zip-tied to a table, and one of the blue-suited FBI agents eases into a chair across from us. Until they ran our info and realized we were skiptracers, they’d assumed we were working with Haswell. Coming back to pick up his computers for him. Now they were just pissed.

“We finally had Haswell staked out, and you got him right out of town under our noses.”

“Jesus,” one of the FBI suits keeps saying, rubbing her forehead and sighing as she paces around us. Then she grabs Toto’s shirt, and shouts into his face. “Do you have any idea what this man is currently into? When you created this algorithm to look for his writing, did you stop and read it?”

“I didn’t have time!” I protest, trying to get her away from Toto. “I was working on the match possibilities. I basically cobbled together a bunch of scripts…”

Her attention is on me, and I flinch. “So you didn’t bother to stop and read?”

“No,” I say. “Like I said…”

“He’s openly talking about trying to crack fucking nuclear missile codes. Sure, he did it under a handle, but you’re not the only one running text analysis. We found him as well. Only unlike you amateurs we actually stopped to read him.”

I remember snatches of text. Reactionary, rich Silicon Valley stuff floating around the net. Nothing I didn’t see in most anonymous forums. Between that and the anarchists, I mostly just tuned it all out as the background static that came with interfacing with a hacker community.

“Lot of idiots say a lot of stupid things,” Toto says. “Do you chase down every idiot calling for armed overthrow online? Because you’d end up wasting a lot of time at certain news sites…”

The agent’s attention is back on Toto. “This one is for real, has already struck, and you let him get away!”

One of the other agents pulls her away from us and tells her to calm down. The entire environment is really hostile.

This is feeling electric, and scary. Haswell has been getting into some seriously stupidly high level dangerous stuff online.

“He had a GPS chip on him, so his friends could find him,” I defend myself. “And he had some way of triggering it. Maybe a simple check-in sequence online. I don’t know. Maybe you can back trace that.” I’m trying to help clean up. But no one looks happy. I’m grasping at straws.

“You let him get away,” the agent repeats, and kicks a chair.

“Is it even possible?” Toto asks. “You can’t really think he’s able to hack into our nuclear launch system?”

His eyes widen as he reads the room. Everyone in here believes it.

“To get into the nuke codes.” I look at them, following Toto’s thinking. “Aren’t there, like, daily changes of the code. Security. Chain of command. Two people to turn the switch and all that?”

The FBI agent stares down at me. “Well, Haswell thinks he’s found a way around it. And seeing as that he was able to take over someone’s car to try and kill them, we can’t afford to take the chance he’s bluffing, can we?”

Haswell had said he was going to push the power switch. System reset. What kind of system reset do you think a guy like Haswell’s planning if the FBI says he’s trying to get his hands on nuke launch codes?

A chill runs down my spine.

• • • •

They cut us loose a few hours later. We flee town, tails tucked between our legs.

“Goddamnit, Toto. This is worse than Florida,” I shout. My laptop’s been seized, as well as my phone. I’m probably going to have a criminal record. The suits ensconced in their air-conditioned, glass palaces would throw me out the door twice as hard now. No normal office job life on the table now, not even as a back up.

And that didn’t even matter, did it? I’m freaking about the wrong shit. Because Haswell might be trying to launch nukes. Or sell the codes. Hold us all hostage. Or something horrific. Whatever he’s going to do once he gets them, it can’t be good.

“I’m sorry,” Toto says softly.

“Fuck!” I hit the dashboard. “Why’d you have to try and fix everything? If you’d just left it alone. Let me keep trying for an office job.”

“I’m sorry,” Toto says again. He looks beat, head bowed and shoulders slumped.

I soften. “No, I’m not being fair. Not your fault. I should have scanned for signals. Should have…” I stop. I’ve been thinking about how to track him. How to hunt down his trail. I want to stop this from fucking everything up even more.

But now I’m thinking we need to find where he’s going. We need to skate to the puck.

“Overalls,” I say to Toto. “

Overalls

.”

• • • •

We don’t have a phone. We don’t have a computer. We have a car, and I make Toto spin us back around. There are ICBMs hiding underground around the small town in concrete silos, scattered between the farms. Strange crops. Blank spots in the map. “Since budget cuts, they’ve been outsourcing some plant maintenance for the military. Risky, so the background checks on it are high, but the money is good. No one gets to touch the missiles, but obviously Haswell’s found a way in. He was wearing overalls for one of the companies handling silo maintenance.”

Toto speeds up. Something falls off the Corolla and bounces into the ditch. We’re wobbling like a bad amusement ride but making good time.

“No one’s gonna listen to us, a couple of crazies showing up at a secure military installation. We should go into town and tell the feds.”

“We forced Haswell’s hand. He’s going to hurry now.” Reboot the machine, he had said. “Let me talk to the guards when we get there.”

“They’re gonna shoot you,” Toto predicts.

I’m quiet for a while. They’ll be armed. Won’t take any kind of threat peaceably. Hell, they’ll kill Haswell if they realize what he is up to.

Which is why, I realize, Haswell isn’t going to be trapped in the silo when the damn thing surprisingly launches.

“Stop. Stop! Now!”

Toto obliges. “What?”

“He doesn’t want to get shot.” I kick the door open, as it doesn’t want to swing on its warped hinges. Toto has stopped on the shoulder of the road.

I clamber onto the back of the Corolla and onto the roof, surveying the flat horizon of land stretching away. It’s approaching dusk. I’m looking for something tall enough Haswell can broadcast from.

I spot blinking aircraft hazard lights hanging in the air.

I jump down to the ground. “There.”

Haswell needs line of sight, and somewhere to swamp the world with a powerful wireless signal to access the electronics he’s snuck into the missile silo… or silos. Haswell needs a tower. I start trying to wave down passing cars, and up begging to borrow a phone for a second off a wary looking older man in a minivan.

I can’t reach the sheriff. The FBI puts me on hold. I leave messages for them both, give back the cellphone, and head back to the car.

We’re going to have to do this ourselves.

Toto sees the look on my face and knows.

Once more into the breach

.

I drive, hunkered down over the wheel and looking up into the dusk for the blinking lights that will guide us in. He kicks the glovebox with a knee and pulls out a thick, gray revolver with what looks like a forearm-long barrel.

As we pass from asphalt into dirt service road, the car skidding and kicking up dust, Toto flicks the chamber open and calmly, expertly, inserts six bullets.

“You can get out,” I say, voice quavering slightly. “I can go in alone.”

“It’s my mess, too. I’m not leaving your side.”

I hide my relief. A minute later I slam the car through a wire mesh fence and come skidding to a halt near the electric company truck that slammed into us earlier. The front end of it is all twisted up from the impact. There’s another truck just past it, near the foot of the massive radio antenna. Thick coaxial cables snake out of the van and up to the tower’s base.