Lynne frowned. “How do you know?”
“I’ve seen it before,” she murmured, her shoulders slumping. She swallowed, and Tace could swear her lips formed the wordsI’m sorry. She took a deep breath. “It was one of the things they studied.”
“Studied?” Jax dusted salt off his hands. “Who arethey?Where did they study this?”
She kept her gaze on Tace. Her entire body shuddered, and her eyes lost all expression. “At the Bunker. It’s one of the things the scientists studied at the nearest Bunker.”
Chapter Seventeen
The sum of all mistakes can be wrapped up into onedecision made in one moment.
—Sami Steel
Sami waited outside the conference room, sitting on the steps leading to the apartments. Everyone would gather in five minutes, and she’d have to tell the truth. She dropped her chin onto her hand, unable to stop the flashback.
She’d been in North Dakota with her soon-to-be exboyfriend, the smartest man she’d ever met. They were alone in the basement of a three-story office building he’d purchased with money stolen from a hotel magnate. “What have you done?” she whispered, her hands shaking.
Spiral had looked up, his soft blue eyes now gleaming and somehow darker. “This has to end. Everything we’ve done, everything that has happened, is all retribution. Don’t you get it? God is mad.”
Sami swallowed. Servers lined one wall, consoles another. “What are you talking about?” She’d joined him in his crusade to track down Internet predators and people working in the slave trade, and she’d known many of their methods were illegal. Hacking into secured federal government databases had been a necessary evil.
That had put their names on FBI wanted lists.
She could live with that, but as the code for a new computer virus flashed across the bigger wall screen, her heart stopped. “Spiral. You didn’t.”
“I did.” At twenty-six, Spiral Samuelson looked much younger with his pale skin, blue eyes, and clean-shaven face. He was tall and wiry, and he had read multiple books on how to please a woman.
They’d been dating four months when he’d contracted the fever but protected her from getting ill. Most of their friends had died, and it appeared that the infection was running rampant across the country.
Two weeks after Spiral had survived Scorpius, Sami began to notice a change in her boyfriend. He’d started memorizing the Bible, and he’d begun chatting with people on the Net about Armageddon. At first, she’d thought he was just reacting to the impossible world they were about to face, but now? Now she could see madness in his programming.
A line of code caught her eye, and she fell back, her heart almost stopping. “Oh my God.”
Spiral nodded and gleefully jumped up and down. “It’s a computer virus, Sam. See it? See what it can do? Not just bacteria are dangerous to us . . . look what I made.”
She shook her head. “No,” she whispered. He’d created a bug that attacked software and changed the routing to null. “This won’t work long-term.” She could come up with a software fix if she had enough time.
“Yes, it will.” He lifted his chin. “I’ve hit all thirteen root servers, and the key is . . . there aren’t enough people working to fix them. Scorpius has either killed or is currently attacking most of the people who maintain those servers.”
She coughed. It was possible. “Stop it. You have to stop it.”
Spiral cackled like a crazy witch. “The Internet is going down, baby. Say good-bye to technology. God wants us back to basics.”
“No.” She grabbed her keyboard and started furiously typing, trying to delete the code. The barrel of a gun pressed against her temple. She stilled and turned slightly. “Spiral?”
He pressed harder. “Don’t deny God.”
“God doesn’t want this,” she croaked out. “God likes the Internet. You can’t do this.”
“I just did.” His grip on the gun remained steady, and he leaned forward to be closer to the screen. “Oh, look. Six of the servers have already been infected. I also created a secondary attack with several automatic software updates. The Internet is about to be gone.”
“The Internet is like a worm. Take out some of it, and the rest will survive.” Tears clogged her eyes.
“Only with proper maintenance and fixes,” he said happily. “We don’t have those any longer.”
Bile rose in her throat.
An explosion sounded from upstairs, rocking the entire basement.
