It opened.
There was a brief second or two of a standard hourglass; then the software took over the whole of his screen, the whole of his
It opened into an image, a virtual version of the White House. He was somewhere in the grounds of the big building. It was a sunny day, and the grass was green underfoot. In front of him, a fountain, surrounded by a low hedge, sprayed virtual water up into the air, digital droplets sparkling in the bright sun before cascading back to earth.
Now, finally, he understood what Skullface had meant. It wasn’t just an online forum; it was virtual-meeting software, where their avatars would see and talk to each other in a cyberworld. Like Third Life. They would probably meet in the Oval Office itself, he thought. No, Skullface said dinner—it would be in the formal dining room.
By thinking himself forward, he began to move, skirting around the side of the fountain toward the front doors.
He moved across a roadway, past the white pillars, up a flight of stairs toward the huge double doors of the White House, which were set in an arched entranceway.
He imagined the doors opening, but they did not.
He opened his eyes and tried clicking on the doors with his mouse, but they remained solidly closed.
He closed his eyes again and looked around.
To the right of the doors, conveniently placed at head height on the door frame, was a black rectangular plastic shape with a white button in the center.
A doorbell.
Sam chuckled to himself. So simple. The final hurdle was not a hurdle at all.
At the start it had seemed impossible, yet here he was, at the front door of the White House, about to embark on an incredible new adventure. What would he learn? Who would he meet?
He took a deep breath and clicked on the doorbell.
A sound intruded and he opened his eyes with a start, shutting off the audiovisual feed from the neuro- connector. The White House doors and the doorbell were still there, though, staring at him from the laptop screen.
Surely he had just imagined that sound.
He kept his eyes open and tried again, this time preferring traditional methods. He reached out and grasped his mouse with his right hand and moved it over to the doorbell.
Drawing in his breath again, he clicked on the button a second time.
And jumped out of his chair with sudden, terrible knowledge and fear.
Outside his bedroom, past the kitchen, where his mother was preparing dinner, at the end of the hallway, at the front door of their sixth-floor apartment, the doorbell rang again.
8 | KIWI
Sam lay on the lumpy mattress on the metal-framed bunk, staring blankly at the ceiling of his cell and watching fuzzy specks of eyeball dust float around like microbes in a solution on a microscope slide.
He felt he was going mad. Three days locked in a cell they called a bedroom. But it had wire mesh on the windows, and the door was permanently locked, which seemed more like a prison cell to Sam.
Three days ago, he had raced down the hallway to the front door of their apartment. Terrified of opening the door, but even more terrified of his mother opening it first.
The man standing there wore tactical black SWAT-type coveralls and a Kevlar vest. A pistol in a black leather holster was strapped halfway down his thigh. He was in his late twenties. Not short, but not tall either. His hair was slicked back in a style reminiscent of old fifties rock ’n’ rollers, as if to make him taller, and he wore dark aviator- style mirrored glasses, which he removed as Sam opened the door.
The man was flanked by two others in identical uniforms but who had automatic rifles slung across their chests. They stood back from the doorway, against the wall on the opposite side of the hall, and their gazes flicked left and right as if they were expecting trouble.
All three of them wore flesh-colored earpieces with a curly wire that disappeared around the back of their necks.
Through a half-open door on the other side of the corridor, Louis, the Neanderthal fourteen-year-old, watched, wide-eyed.
“Sam Wilson?” the first man asked.
Sam nodded mutely.
“I’m Special Agent Ranger Tyler from the Department of Homeland Security, Cyber Defense Division. I am placing you under arrest on suspicion of government network infiltration and sabotage. You have the right …”
Sam didn’t get to hear his rights. Not just then, anyway.
“What?” his mother screamed from right behind him. “What is going on? What are you doing? What …” There were quite a lot of “what’s,” in fact.
None of which fazed the men in black at all.
Since then, he had been here. Wherever
He had seen it when they had flown over in the black Learjet emblazoned with Homeland Security logos, and again, up close, through the wire-mesh windows of the black Chevy van that had brought him from the small airfield to his new home.
As prisons went, it could have been worse, he thought. The floors were a polished dark wood, and the walls were timber panels, although he suspected they covered a more solid, concrete construction. There was a toilet in a cupboard on the left side of the bedroom and a communal shower block at the end of the hallway.
It wasn’t a prison for adults. It was some kind of remand center or juvie hall for youth offenders. Nobody he saw through the mesh on the window looked older than eighteen.
There was a beep from the electronic lock on his door and it opened. It was one of the wardens, a hard-faced man named Brewer with a gut that hung low over his belt.
Brewer looked around the cell before placing a large cardboard box on the floor. It bore a red label with the word “inspected.”
He scowled at Sam and left.
Sam got up off the bunk and opened the carton.
On the inside flap, he found a huge heart drawn with a thick marker pen and
That was the only communication from his mother in three days.
The carton was full of clothes: shirts, shorts, and socks.
Under the first layer of clothes was his model of Thunderbird 2, carefully wrapped in a couple of T-shirts. He took it out and placed it on the windowsill.
Below that were some sweaters, although it was too warm for those just yet.
He started to lift them out, then stopped, his fingers nerveless. He let the sweaters slip back into the box. In his mind, an image of his mother, sitting by herself at the small round dining table of their apartment, eating meals by herself.
Another image. This one of him sitting in this same cell as the fall leaves drifted off their branches. As the cold winter winds began to howl across the state and the first tiny soft snowflakes turned into flurries of white ice.
He had been so sure of himself, so confident of his own cleverness, that he hadn’t ever really stopped to consider the consequences of his actions. He had charged around the country’s networks as if he was playing a computer game. But it wasn’t a game. It was real.
He’d thought he couldn’t be caught, and yet the whole time they had been watching him, just waiting to pounce. That uncomfortable feeling he had had inside the Telecomerica network. That had been more than just a case of nerves or indigestion. Thinking he could fool them with a C-3PO mask at the hackers’ conference. What a
