Cyber Dawn (A Ben Raine Novel) (18 page)

Unprepared for the collision, the man fell sideways and into a small wooden desk that sat at the end of the aisle. He toppled over it and disappeared from view. We didn’t stop to see if he was okay.

“Get them!” yelled another male voice.

Five feet.

We hit the bottom of the stairs running.

“Stop,” yelled the first man.

I reached back and pulled Sarah up the stairs ahead of me. Two swoosh sounds came from behind and the plaster on the wall next to us exploded.

Plink!
A third bullet struck the staircase handrail.

“They are shooting at us!” Sarah exclaimed.

“Keep going,” I yelled back. I pushed her as hard as I could without shoving her over. At the top of the stairs, we took a hard right. The metal exit door was directly ahead.

Just before we reached it, I ran around Sarah and slammed my side into the emergency bar. The door flew open. The alarm wailed.

We spilled onto a wrought iron landing.

It was raining hard and the metal was slick. I slid into the railing and bent over it at the waist. I grabbed it with one hand, but too much momentum sent me over.

“Ben!” Sarah yelled. She bent far over the rail and grabbed my arm with both hands.

“Keep going!” I yelled back. “I’ll meet you down there!”

For a second, her face froze in shock. She then nodded, let go, and took off down the stairs.

I glanced down. It was roughly twenty feet.

A commotion at the door drew my eyes back up. Two shadows appeared in the doorway, along with a gleaming metal assault rifle.

I swallowed hard and did the only thing I could do.

I let go.

The fall felt like it was in slow motion. Air flowed up and around me. More out of instinct than any sort of super-human reflexes, I lifted my left leg so that my right leg impacted first. It hit the ground hard, but absorbed most of the impact. A split-second later, my left foot struck the ground, twisting as it hit. I grunted as pain shot through my ankle.

I swung around and spotted Sarah racing down the stairs. As she hit the second floor landing, a new voice boomed.

“Hey, you two. Stop!”

I scanned the side of the building and spotted Oscar, flashlight in one hand, radio in the other.

“Hurry!” I called to Sarah.

She landed on the ground and sprinted across the grass to me.

“I said stop!” Oscar yelled again. “I’m calling the police!”

The squawk of a radio followed along with Oscar’s call for help.

“Ben, are you okay?”

I nodded and looked down at my ankle. Whatever damage I did wasn’t enough to keep me from running. We took off across the lawn and into the woods. Ahead I could hear the river flowing. Where we were, it was too deep, so I led Sarah to a path I knew would take us to a shallower part of the river. The one students used to cross to the other side.

As we ran, I glanced down and noticed three dots on my tracking sphere. The two guys chasing us plus Oscar. None of them chose to pursue us into the woods.

A thought struck me.

I stopped running and turned to look back at the school.

“Ben? What?” Sarah said through heavy breaths. She bent over and rested her hands on her knees.

“Oscar,” I said. “He could be in danger.”

She looked past me at the school. “Who were they?”

“Not sure,” I said. “CyberLife, I think.”

“That doesn’t make sense.”

“I know,” I said.

Just then, the sound of sirens filled the air. Through the trees, I could see a pair of police cars fly into the student parking lot.

Sarah and I exchanged a glance.

“He’ll be ok,” she said. “Whoever they were, they can’t be that stupid.”

Sarah was right. CyberLife wouldn’t be crazy enough to take on the police.

No way
, I thought as we turned and sprinted to the river.

No way.

27

After catching my breath, I glanced at the sphere and felt a new wave of panic. Instead of three white dots, there were dozens.

I spun my head around.

“What’s wrong?” Sarah asked.

“Not sure,” I said. “Didn’t have time to tell you earlier, but my HUD has some sort of tracking system. In the library, those two men showed up as white dots. Now I see at least a dozen.”

Sarah searched the area around us, then asked, “Are you sure they’re people?”

“Pretty sure,” I replied. “The dots matched up with those guys chasing us. The third was you.”

Sarah pursed her lips. “Unless you have radar or something, I don’t know how that’s possible. Unless you’re tapping into a signal of some kind. GPS, Wi-Fi, something like that.”

“That’s it,” I said. “GPS. I saw something about it in the log.”

“GPS makes sense,” she said, nodding. “It’s widely used to track the location of things. Phones, cars, pets . . . even people. I bet you were seeing their smart phones. Mine, too.” She pulled her phone from her pocket and waved it around. “The dots you’re seeing now are probably GPS signals from inside these homes all around us.”

I breathed a sigh of relief. “I bet you’re right.”

“If so, that’s pretty awesome,” she said. “Now let’s find some shelter.”

I grabbed the top of the fence we were crouched by and pulled myself up. On the other side was a large, heavily wooded back yard. The back of the house was dark. To the right, about twenty feet away, was a wooden play set with a fort on top.

“Come on,” I said. “Hop the fence.”

I climbed up and then reached down to help Sarah. Once we were both over, we ran to the play set, climbed the tiny ladder, and ducked inside. It wasn’t completely enclosed, but did a fair job keeping the rain from falling on our heads.

I reached down and gently rubbed my ankle. Sarah’s eyes followed my movements.

“You okay?”

“Yeah, think so. Just tweaked it when I fell.”

“You’re lucky that’s all you did,” she replied. “I would have broken both my legs.”

After resting for a minute, Sarah asked, “You really think it was CyberLife?”

“I think so,” I said. “Maybe they . . .”

“No way they traced the hack,” Sarah said quickly, reading my mind. “Not that fast. They’re good. But not that good. We weren’t in the school for more than an hour.”

“What about the police?”

Sarah laughed. “Especially not the cops. They would need warrants and all sorts of other things before coming to find us. Besides, I can’t see them sneaking around a library in ninja outfits.”

“Yeah, that’s what I was thinking, too.”

“Maybe they weren’t looking for us,” Sarah said. “Maybe they were there to rob the place, and we surprised them.”

I thought about that for a minute. Not a terrible theory. But then again, I couldn’t recall ever hearing a story about ninjas robbing a school library. The computers were several years old, and not worth much. And I doubted there was an active black market for used library books.

Sarah’s body suddenly tensed. She pulled away and yanked the laptop out of her backpack.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

She ignored me and started typing. A moment later, she blurted out, “We have to go! Now!”

She stuffed her computer back in her bag and grabbed my arm. We jumped off the fort and ran out of the yard. Down the street, I heard the unmistakable sound of tires squealing.

“Sarah, what did you find?” I asked as we ran.

“GPS,” she said between quick breaths. “Your system. Once every ten minutes it reports your position.”

We ran through another back yard before I spotted a drainage ditch that ran through the middle of the neighborhood. It was lined on either side by large, old trees.

“Over here,” I said, pulling Sarah to my right.

We jumped down into the ditch. I winced. A foot of freezing water was moving through it.

Down the street, the vehicle screeched to a stop. Doors opened, then slammed shut. On my tracking sphere, a pair of dots moved quickly. After a half-minute, they slowed down. Judging by how far we’d run, the two men were searching in the area we had just been.

Several moments passed before I heard hushed voices and what sounded like a man talking into a phone. With one eye glued to the sphere, I slowly climbed the bank and peered over the edge.

“What are you doing,” Sarah whispered.

“It’s okay,” I said. “Trying to get a look at who’s following us.”

Stopped at the intersection forty-five feet away was a black Range Rover, its engine idling. Two men in black uniforms stood nearby, illuminated by a street lamp. Each had a pair of night-vision goggles resting on top of their heads. One pointed at a tablet computer and the other was on his phone.

“They don’t look like typical CyberLife security guards,” I whispered down to Sarah.

She inched up next to me on her belly and looked over the edge. After a few seconds, she turned to me, and said, “Not police either.”

I shook my head. We slid back down the embankment.

“This way,” I whispered.

I led Sarah another twenty feet down the drainage ditch until we reached a large clump of river birch trees, which provided us with some cover from the men and the rain.

I glanced at my phone. “Four minutes, Sarah.”

“Right,” she said as she pulled her laptop out of her bag.

The rain continued to fall, so I pulled my jacket off and made a makeshift tarp for her. As the screen lit up, I scooted closer, not wanting the light to escape. I felt myself blush when our cheeks touched.

“Can you disable it?” I asked.

She ignored me and continued typing, again reminding me a lot of Megan.
When focused on computer, do not disturb.

With less than thirty seconds to spare, she stopped and let out a deep sigh. “It’s off,” she said.

Without thinking about it first, something I seemed prone to do with her, I turned and kissed her on the cheek. “See, I do need you.”

Instead of pulling away or punching me, she smiled.

“You totally do,” she whispered. “Now let’s get out of here.”

28

We briefly debated returning to Starbucks to get my Jeep. Ultimately, it was too close to the school and the two men from the library might still be in the area. Not to mention the police. The drive to Sarah’s apartment would have been less than ten minutes. The walk, however, was just over an hour.

We stopped in front of an old apartment building on the edge of downtown. It was four stories tall with a faded red-brick exterior and a green entryway awning.

Sarah nodded at the front door. “This is me.”

“Good,” I said. “Any longer and I was worried you’d turn into an icicle.”

“You look like somebody beaned you in the head with a snowball,” she shot back.

I laughed.

“You’re coming up, right?”

“Coming . . . up?” I stuttered.

“Yeah, dummy. Where else you gonna go?”

I had planned to take the bus or text Mason for a ride.

“It’s the middle of the night,” Sarah said with a shake of her head. “Besides,
if
those guys were from CyberLife, and
if
they know it was you in the library, don’t you think they’d already be staking out your house?”

I slowly nodded.
Who else but CyberLife could be tracking me?

“You really want to be alone?” Sarah continued. “Didn’t you say Sofia was gone this weekend visiting her mom or something?”

“Yeah, good point.”

“Then come on,” she said. “And don’t be weird about it. We can eat something, rest for a bit, then head out to see Dr. Carter in the morning.”

“Wait. What?”

“Carter. I pulled his address from the CyberLife server while you were gone in the library. Maybe he can answer some questions about your medical record.”

“You really think that’s a good idea? I mean, Carter used to work for CyberLife.”

“I know that. But he’s an old dude,” she said. “Like fifty. What’s he going to do?”

“I guess,” I said, unconvinced it was a good idea. The men with guns had upped the stakes and I was less enthusiastic about pursuing things. But part of me really needed to find out more about the strange date on the email. Other than Carter, we didn’t have any leads.

“Then you go to the police,” Sarah added.

“Yes,” I said. “Then I go to the police.”

Sarah turned and walked to the entrance. I followed and we climbed the four flights of stairs to the top floor. Like the building itself, her apartment was small and old. But it was clean and had a well-taken-care-of feel about it. As we walked through the living room, I stared longingly at the couch. My body couldn’t decide whether to eat or sleep. It was one in the morning.

In the kitchen, I sat down at a small breakfast table. Sarah pulled a plate of left-over chicken from the fridge and warmed it in the microwave.

“So, about the police thing,” she said with a mouthful of food. “I’m not sure . . .”

She hesitated.

I knew right away where she was headed. Going to the police meant telling them how I learned what I learned. Which meant telling them about Sarah’s little
hobby
. “I’ve involved you enough in this,” I said. “You’re not going with me.”

Sarah frowned and shook her head. “That’s not . . .”

“I know.” I said.

She looked down for a moment, then softly said, “It’s not really fair, Ben.”

“It’s not about being fair. It’s about decrypting Megan’s words. I made the decision the night she died to try and find out what she meant. This is on me. I’ll tell the cops I did the hacking.”