Keiran tries to imagine a plausible escape route. None is obvious. The parking garage's interior is laid out in a giant helix, like New York's Guggenheim museum. Elevators and stairs descend from the northeast and southwest corners of the building. Both corners will surely both be watched. Mulligan's car is parked on the western edge of the roof. Keiran can probably hotwire it, but he cannot drive it well enough to escape the police. The garage is much taller than any other buildings around them, ruling out any escape to a connecting rooftop. The street lights of Santa Monica wink red and green seven sheer stories below, and there is nothing above them but the night sky. Keiran shakes his head, as if he might dislodge a moment of genius. Think outside the box. There must be some hack, some unexpected action, some lateral leap of logic that can save them. But nothing comes to mind. They are boxed in.
"We could call backup," his hiptop says. "Seal the place, have them arrested."
"I want that bonus," the other voice says, his voice muffled but decipherable. "Stay here and watch the exits. Show your badge, get the attendants to help. I'll go top and work down. If they get past us, then we call it in. They won't get far, Santa Monica's crawling with squad cars."
"Shit," Danielle said. "Shit shit shit."
"Come on," Keiran says. He doesn't know how to get out, but he knows if they stay where they are, they'll be captured immediately.
"The stairs."
"They'll see us."
"We're not descending all the way. Give me that." He takes the hiptop from her as they begin to descend, and switches off the speakerphone.
They have gone down only one level when they hear the elevator ding on the roof above them. They freeze for a moment. If their pursuer takes the stairs immediately, they are caught. But they hear his boots moving away. Obviously he plans to walk the garage's helix from top to bottom, checking under cars and other hiding spots, hoping to flush them out to the ground floor where his partner waits. He is unaware that his prey know they are being hunted.
"We can just go back up top in a moment," Danielle whispers, as Keiran leads them out onto the third floor.
"No," Keiran says. "Then they call backup and we're not murdered but we're definitely arrested. We have to get out before they give up on finding us. Except I have no idea how."
"The lights," Jayalitha suggests. "If there is a wire we can find and sever. In darkness they will never see us."
Keiran stops in mid-step and turns to stare at Jayalitha. "That's brilliant. The lights. Of course."
"How? Find the fuse box? It'll be locked," Danielle says.
"The rather large fuse box." Smiling now, he takes out the Virgin Mobile phone again and punches a long series of numbers into it, establishing a secure connection to Mulligan's mobile phone.
"Yo," Mulligan answers.
Keiran says, "We got hacked and tracked. We need darkness and we need it ten seconds ago." He hangs up immediately.
"What do we do now?" Jayalitha asks.
"Same thing we've been doing all night. Pray that Mulligan's as good as I think he is."
The seconds ease by, much slower than Keiran would like. The elevator they stand next to dings, and the shock causes him to nearly swallow his own tongue, but it contains only a young couple, who give them curious looks before returning to their car and driving off.
Keiran still has his hiptop to his ear. A few seconds after the couple's car disappears down the helix, he stiffens; the other officer, the one who stayed on ground level, has told the attendants to start asking outgoing drivers if they had seen a white couple and an Indian woman.
"We have move to the other stairs," he commands. Danielle and Jayalitha look startled, but there is no time to explain. They are midway across the parking garage when they see the hawk-faced man begin to descend the strip of pavement that leads to them from Level 4.
Their pursuer is closer than they are to the northeastern stairs. And when he sees them, he starts to run.
"Police officer! Don't move or I'll shoot!" he shouts.
They run. They are almost at the southwestern stairs when the other man, the fat man, appears in the stairs' open doorway, crouched in a shooter's stance, the barrel of his gun levelled at them. It is animal terror more than thought that causes them to go from sprint to halt so rapidly that Keiran stumbles and nearly falls.
"That's far enough," the fat man growls. "Hands behind your head. Against the wall."
Keiran and Danielle look at one another. There is nowhere left to run. Keiran is coldly certain they will shoot if they need to. Slowly, they interlace their hands behind their head and proceed to the wall next to the elevator. The fat man and hawk-faced man are behind them, approaching, handcuffs jingling in their hands, when five miles south of them, in Scattergood Power Station on Manhattan Beach, a false alarm triggers an emergency shutdown, and all Santa Monica blacks out.
** *
Jayalitha, Danielle, and Keiran, who have spent the last minute praying for exactly this eventuality, react first, sprint along the wall to the stairs during the few seconds it takes their pursuers to react to the shock of blindness. That is all the head start they need. Their non-uniformed pursuers do not have flashlights, and the darkness in the garage is total. Keiran somehow manages to take the stairs in the darkness at a dead sprint, three at a time, without falling. Once at ground level, they can see a little; the major streets are eerily illuminated by car headlights. The city's darkness is powerfully unnatural. It feels as if they are at a midnight auto rally in a desert ghost town.
"This way," Danielle says, and leads them north. They pelt across Wilshire Boulevard into a residential zone that has so little vehicle traffic at this hour it is almost entirely blacked out. They zigzag for several more blocks before stopping, all of them panting with exhaustion.
"This won't last long," Keiran warns. "They've seen how we look now, they'll call the Santa Monica cops on us. We need to get out. Or hide somewhere until the lights go on and Mulligan can get the car and pick us up."
"Hide," Danielle says. "Shit. I don't know this area too well."
"The beach is near," Jayalitha says.
Danielle smiles thinly. "Yes. Getting to be a habit. We can even try last night's trick again if we have to."
But thankfully that isn't necessary. Ten minutes after the city lights reignite, Mulligan picks them up by the Santa Monica Pier and drives them north through Pacific Palisades to Sunset Boulevard.
"Oh, crap," Mulligan says, when they are heading east on Sunset.
"What?"
"Don't look around, but there's a cop behind us."
Keiran swallows. He sees the following black-and-white in Mulligan's side mirror. They drive in complete silence for the next few minutes. Keiran closes his eyes and tries to pretend the silent tension does not exist. Being pulled over would almost be better than this waiting. But Mulligan drives with unusual precision, and their follower eventually veers off onto a different route.
"Jesus fuck," Mulligan says. His entire body is glistening with sweat. "This is why I don't leave the house. The real world's too fucking uncontrollable."
** *
Mulligan feels better when they are back safe in his apartment. "Not a bad night," he says. "Snarfed their phones, tracked their boss, shut down half of LA for twenty minutes, and got away clean. Beats watching TV."
"We broke LoTek's Law with that blackout," Keiran says darkly. "They will look into why it happened."
"They won't trace us."
"The more we use Shazam like that, the more certain it becomes that someone finds out what it can do."
"You know it's near its Best Before anyways," Mulligan says. "Everyone who's anyone uses BitTorrent now."
Keiran shrugs. This is true, but he doesn't want to admit that his secret hacking weapon will soon be obsolete. "I was hoping to wring a couple years out of it yet."
"Is it possible to eat something?" Jayalitha asks.
"Yeah," Danielle agrees. "If there's one thing I've learned this year, it's that fear makes you fucking famished."
Mulligan orders a pizza while Keiran works to trace the phone number they just acquired, and very nearly traded their lives for. It doesn't take him long; again, it is a Virgin Mobile number, and by now he knows their database as if he built it himself.
"Eureka," Keiran says. "The phone is anonymous, but it was last used in Las Vegas."
"Vegas," Mulligan says meaningfully.
Keiran and Mulligan look at each other.
"BlackHat," Keiran says, smiling.
"Got to be."
"We can't get there. Our ID won't arrive. I don't want to go naked."
"He'll stay for DefCon," Mulligan suggests.
"Of course. Yes. Perfect."
"Explain to us lay women, please," Danielle says, obviously annoyed by their cryptic conversation. She stands and looks over Keiran's shoulder, as if the call records displayed there might explain everything.
"We know where he'll be this weekend," Mulligan says. "Where?"
"DefCon," Keiran says. "World's biggest hacker convention-slash-party. It's this coming weekend, in Las Vegas. All the hacking world's great and good turn up. Except hermits like Mulligan. If P2's already in Vegas, he'll certainly stay for DefCon. And I strongly doubt he knows we have his phone number. With only a little luck we can use it to track hiim down."
"What are we going to do when we catch him?" Danielle asks.
"We will humbly request of him that he shares with us his hacking arsenal, and reveals all of Justice International's super secret files."
She gives Keiran an uneasy look. "And what if he says no?"
"He will not say no," Jayalitha says, her eyes flashing.
"But what – "Danielle begins.
"This is the man who led the Frenchman to my family. Who sent me into exile. Believe me when I tell you, if you bring him to me, he will tell us whatever we need to know."
After a moment Danielle asks, in a near-whisper, "The Frenchman?"
Jayalitha says, "The man who burned my family in my house was a French soldier. That is all I know. But I will ask this P2 about him as well."
Danielle turns pale and sits down hard on Mulligan's couch. "What?"
Jayalitha asks. "Do you know of him?"
"Yes," Keiran says bleakly. "Laurent."
** *
SuperCheap Car Rental, located just a few blocks from LAX, rents elderly cars with tens of thousands of miles on them for cheap monthly rates. Danielle and Jayalitha are visibly nervous as they and Keiran stand in their office and use their brand-new drivers' licenses and credit cards to rent a car. Keiran is slightly perturbed as well, not from any fear that their ID might fail, but because the proprietors insist on photographing their customers. Although the thousands of tiny photographs that line the office walls do imply that this is not special treatment.
"How can you be sure they don't track their cars?" Danielle asks as she gets behind the wheel of their new ride, a battered maroon Toyota Corolla with 75,000 miles on the odometer. "If they find out we're using fake ID –"
"Simple economics," Keiran says. "Look at their office. Look at this car. It isn't worth tracking, and they couldn't afford it if it was. And our identities are not fake, they're false. They're just as good as a real person's."
"Would it be possible to arrange a passport?" Jayalitha asks from the back seat.
Keiran shakes his head. "Sorry. My magic is fickle. The passport office is still beyond me."
Jayalitha nods. "How long is the drive to Las Vegas?"
"Six hours," Danielle says. "Buckle up. I'm going to do it in five."