It was like she’d told Yardley. She knew him better than he’d ever known her.
“After you.” Dr. Brown opened the door and moved to the side. He didn’t scan her for electronics or even look closely at the street behind her. KC’s general impression was that, now that she had arrived, he was happy.
He wanted her to be impressed with him. He always had.
“My study.” Dr. Brown smiled again. “I think you’ll be pleased with what I’ve assembled. I have everything you asked for.”
KC followed him into the room. It was crisp and dry from whatever environmental control he was using to cool the rack of servers alongside his desk. There were three monitors and a desktop CPU in a clear case, an extremely fast and expensive model. Beneath the central monitor was a row of unused ports. She did a quick scan as she sat down in the Herman Miller chair, then looked over her shoulder at him. “Do you mind if I confirm everything is as it should be?”
“After you.” He smiled and pulled out another chair.
“We’re locked in,” Yardley said in her ear. “You’re free to run the checks we planned.”
KC got to work, supplying the agency with as much evidence as she could about his system, as well as giving Kris the heads-up in case there was anything she needed to know before KC deployed the countermeasure. As she discreetly sent data packet after data packet, she was chilled by how extremely prepared Dr. Brown was.
“I’m ready,” she said, as much for the team as Dr. Brown. “Let’s do this.”
He reached into his pocket, and KC wondered again why she couldn’t simply lay him out, snatch the device, and let the National Guard members stationed yards from his property take him into custody. It would be very simple.
Yardley’s argument against it was that there wasn’t any way to guarantee KC’s life in that scenario.
The agency’s argument was that they wanted to collect as much evidence as possible.
He stood, the green case in his hand. “You don’t mind?” He gestured at her chair, inviting her to get out of it.
It took more effort to pull her body from the chair than KC had expected. She knew the next moments had been meticulously planned. She’d drilled for hours on every possible contingency.
None of which had any effect, in the end, on the fact that she didn’t really want to watch him do this.
Dr. Brown took the chair. He set the tiny drive on the desk. It already had a cord attached to its USB-C input. Her heart rate must have spiked, because Yardley’s voice filled her ear with a soft purr. “Easy.”
The countermeasure was, literally, up her sleeve. An identical micro drive, but in a pale-yellow case—incidentally, the color KC had had in her online shopping cart all these months. Her pulse thrummed against it.
“It would be easier to monitor the spread and make sure it reaches its maximum effect if I could get back in there when you’re done.” She sounded normal. Interested.
“I’m not worried.” He reached over, and KC kept her focus on the end of the wire with its small USB connector, forcing herself to breathe.
Then, he put a connector into the port.
But it wasn’t the connector coming out of the drive.
She followed the cord, certain she must be incredibly wrong. It originated from the clear computer case of the CPU to the right of the monitor, the one running the stack of servers in the corner of the room. The case was whirring, lit up with colorful LED lights, and KC saw with a sick wrench of her stomach that there were four fat bricks of Semtex inside it, taped together with packing tape and snuggled against a simple LED detonator.
It was blinking. Powered, now, by the cord he’d just plugged in.
“Fuck,” Atlas breathed in her ear.
“I’m sure you don’t want to deal with the world on the other side of the interrogation table.” Now, Dr. Brown snugged the micro drive into a second port.
“Look, I don’t plan on being caughtordying today,” KC said. “You must realize I got into this in the first place, when I was just a kid, to see what would happen.” They only had seconds. The device was active. Unlocking doors. Taking control of systems. Moving like a dark whisper through the digital pathways that covered Leesburg, Virginia, and snaked outward to cross the entire Eastern Seaboard.
“I do know that,” he said. “But you should know I’m not an arsonist like you. This isn’t about me.”
Bullshit, KC thought.It’s always been about you.
The small light on the end of the micro drive began to blink at the same time she heard the first helicopter. She shook her arm, caught her own micro drive in her palm, lurched over Dr. Brown’s arms, and plugged it in.
Its blue light illuminated, and then he was up, his body against hers, her arm bent behind her back.
