The CleanSweep Conspiracy (2 page)

CHAPTER 2

The Next Stop

T
he train slowed and braked to a stop at the Summerhill station. When the door opened, Matt jumped to his feet and pushed a man to the side.

“What the
…
? Of all the rude
—
”

He didn’t wait for the man to finish. He wanted to get far away from the train. He heard pounding on the door as it closed behind him, and knew it meant they had finally recognized him. He ran the length of the platform, intent on reaching the stairway as quickly as possible. It felt like he was running with lead weights strapped around his ankles. Stopping at the bottom of the stairs, hands on his knees, he struggled for breath.

Whatever
—
happened
—
to my
—
New Year’s
—
resolution
—
a fitness class?
he thought.

He nearly laughed out loud as he imagined all the passengers on the subway trying to dial the police at the same time.

I
would
laugh, if this whole situation wasn’t so damn precarious.

Catching his breath, he rushed the stairs, two at a time, and walked out of the station to face an assault of wet snowflakes the size of postage stamps. He did his best to ignore the chill and drew his too
-
thin jacket tight. The weather wasn’t his true enemy, however; it was fear. He knew he had to get control of his escalating panic.

Those subway car high
-
definition screens that had showed his photo weren’t imagined, though. He tried to reassure himself that most of the other passengers in his crowded subway car were focused on hurrying to or from work and were inured to the bombardment of news bulletins following the riots. Maybe they had ignored the warnings flashed on the screens completely. He wanted to believe that, but the pounding on the subway door had told him otherwise.

He paused to catch his breath at the top of the stairs and spotted two uniformed police officers nearby. He resisted the urge to panic, which would only draw attention. He watched them, standing around with feigned boredom. Matt wasn’t deceived. They were keeping a close watch on things through dull eyes, looking through the mist that rose in spirals from their coffee cups. They didn’t seem to take notice of him, but Matt wasn’t confident that they wouldn’t.

Was Cyberia able to disable their communications before my photo was broadcast? I need to contact him and make sure. If I can’t talk to him, get some advice
…
The thought trailed off.
Man, I’m clearly out of my depth now.

The two cops would surely get a good look at him as he passed, and there must have been surveillance cameras near the subway, he knew. Looking up, he saw them; they were installed to be able to sweep the exterior entrance to the station. He realized the cameras weren’t moving. Maybe they weren’t working. Or they had been disabled by Cyberia.

Am I safe?
Matt needed to be sure. He stared at the cameras. They didn’t move. He had to take a chance.

He walked past the police officers, his face down and collar up. A plan began to form in his mind as he reached the bus shelter. He was sure the SOS warning message on his smartphone had been from Cyberia. He had to have been the one who sent it. Matt needed to get to his computer.

In one of their few short phone conversations, Matt had told Cyberia, “I have an encoded program I can use to reach you. It can be broken with some effort, but I can use it, even if it means potential discovery.”

“You’re right to be careful,” Cyberia had responded in his thick accent. “We have to always be on the alert, to assume we’re being overheard. They’re using the latest version of the security software programs, trolling their way through all formats of electronic communications.”

“Will we ever meet?” he had asked Cyberia.

“Who knows?” Cyberia was a master of the vague and ambiguous, and Matt visualized him shrugging while speaking in his Russian
-
accented English. Cyberia and Matt each had a general idea of the other’s location, but it was only accurate to within a fifty
-
mile radius. That left a lot of space to hide. They were never so impolite as to ask for any personal information. Keeping secrets like that might one day mean the difference between life and death.

Matt was cautious about the government and authority by nature
—
a quality inherited from his parents, who called themselves children of the sixties and who still said things like “sticking it to the man.”

So he had felt drawn to Cyberia when they met in a chat room Matt visited, a site for blogger/journalists. Their connection had grown over two years to the point that Matt now felt he could trust Cyberia, although they had never met in person and had only an online affiliation. He had long ago stopped questioning why that was.

Today, Cyberia was the only person who knew the whole reason Matt was in such danger, why he was in the crosshairs of CleanSweep.

He’d instructed Matt about security measures one day. “We must always be at least five pings apart. They could use a superfast program to catch us, but we should be OK.”

Should?
Doubt cast by that one word always hovered in the back of Matt’s mind.

Now, waiting for the bus, he felt a frantic need for one of his personal laptops. He wanted to use it to reach Cyberia. He needed to find some faint trace of hope. He had several of them; he used them like drug dealers used burner cell phones. He would pick one at random, hoping it wasn’t being monitored. It was an expensive security protocol
—
but necessary under the current circumstances.

Matt stood in the bus shelter, shivering. The wet snow was mixed with rain, but he knew he was shaking from near panic.
I need to calm down,
he thought, but it didn’t help.

He knew he had to get to his hidey
-
hole, his emergency backup place
—
one he’d designed for a time just like this, all the while hoping he would never need to use it. In addition to his laptops, he needed access to his primary computer, the one he’d kept his program from destroying earlier. It held other emergency communication codes.

Do I have what it takes? How can I do this?

The lingering stench of smoke wasn’t as noticeable in this part of the city. Matt hugged himself, trying to warm up as the snow finally gave way to a wet drizzle.

He dropped his arms to his sides and tried to appear calm when he spotted the two cops he had seen earlier again. They walked around the corner and then stopped, stamping their feet to ward off the cold. After a short interval, one of the pair turned his head in another direction; the taller one, however, looked directly at him. Matt saw recognition in his eyes, and his first reaction was to run, but there was nowhere to go. He stood, frozen in fear.

Then something curious happened. Their eyes met, and Matt was confident the officer knew who he was, but she made no move. She stood at the corner with snowflakes touching down on the shoulders of her uniform, absorbed by the fabric as quickly as they landed. The officer kept her hand on her radio, but made no effort to use it. Then she turned suddenly, said something to her partner, and they walked away. It struck Matt as a weird occurrence.

Why didn’t they call for backup
—
or arrest me?

Matt sucked in a deep breath, trying to think about everything he had learned about CleanSweep in the past few weeks, mentally reviewing notes from his interviews. He looked around for cameras. Considering the current state of technology, he wondered whether the high
-
tech camera surveillance system extended to buses and bus kiosks. He hoped not.

If they did, would Cyberia have disabled them as well?

A bus slowed in front of him, interrupting his thoughts. He looked at the route number; it was the one he was waiting for. It pulled to a stop with a
whoosh
of air brakes releasing their grip. He held the fare in his fingers as the door opened. The driver barely glanced in his direction as the coins
chinked
into the box. Matt walked down the aisle and grabbed the back of a nearby seat for support as the driver accelerated, almost as if he were in a furious race to the next stop. Matt stumbled to a seat toward the back as the bus lurched past a parking car.

This wasn’t like the subway. These passengers were the lucky workers who still had jobs after the riots
—
or those under pressure to get new ones
—
the type of people who minded their own business and rarely looked beyond their own noses.

Matt watched a young woman staring out the window at some vacant dream, or so he imagined. A man nodded to the sound of ear candy only he could hear; an earbud draped a thin cord alongside his collar. Matt looked around at other men and women, seat by seat, gazing at the nothingness of their lives.

Don’t they see the peril of CleanSweep?
The word came to Matt, again, uninvited. He tried to think back, to decide when he had first realized what CleanSweep really was, what it stood for, and the enormous significance it held for everyone.
Claussen!
He mentally spat the name. That man and his cronies were following a well
-
used playbook, disturbing the social order and replacing it with a stilted idea of the way things should be, deciding who lived and who died, creating chaos and anarchy.

Claussen knows that I know. That I’m on to him.

Matt began to regret that he had ever turned that investigative rock over. All he’d managed to do was to reveal deceitful men behind the scrim, skittering from sunlight like roaches.
Why did it have to be me? Why did I have to feel the need to blog about their dirty secret?
Matt wondered, and not for the first time.

He was jerked out of the thought as the bus pitched when the driver slammed on the brakes at a stop. Matt watched the driver bully ahead of other cars. The repetition of starting and stopping was almost enough to rock him into feeling secure. He wasn’t fooling himself, however; he knew he would risk exposure again when he got off at his designated intersection. There was no option; he would have to make a transfer to the streetcar.

And we’re going to pass right by the new CleanSweep headquarters soon
—
the most dangerous part of the bus ride.

He leaned his head against the window. It was easy for him to recognize which people standing at each passing intersection were agents; some stood alone, others in teams of two. With their conspicuous dress, they might as well have been wearing uniforms. They glanced at the papers in their hands while monitoring the streets, trying to be discreet. Their attempt at being undercover was ineffectual, their identical black leather coats giving them away. It would have been laughable if the circumstances weren’t so grim.

Pedestrians flowed around them like water flowing past boulders in a small stream.

Then Matt saw something alarming. They all held photos
—
he could see them
—
portraits of Matthew Tremain.

The driver slowed down with a sudden lurch. Matt had to grab the seat in front of him quickly in order to keep from pitching forward and breaking his nose. With the bus stuck in traffic, the driver began honking at the snarl of cars ahead. It was midblock, not at a bus stop. On impulse, Matt jumped up and forced the rear door open. Ignoring the driver’s warning shout, he leaped from the bus and darted between the standing cars.

Matt looked up at the surveillance cameras.
They aren’t moving. Maybe Cyberia is still blocking them
, he thought, hardly daring to hope. Matt dashed into a narrow alley on his left, dodging Dumpsters and boxes of trash.
Is Cyberia so good that he’s able to hack in and disable the entire system?

Matt gave it his all in the run to safety. After taking a quick look around, he was satisfied that none of the watchers had seen him get off the bus. No one seemed to be following him; they were too focused on bus stops and street intersections near the subway stops to notice a man hurtling out of a bus midblock.

When Matt reached the far end of the alleyway, he paused, hands on his knees, trying to regain control of his breathing.

He took extra care as he made his way to his secret office, using back streets and shortcuts
—
anything to avoid detection by cameras or watchers. There was a sensation that everyone knew him, that anyone looking at him would recognize a wanted man. He felt like his panicked demeanor pointed to him like a flashing neon sign, just like one of the electronic screens on the subway car.

At each intersection, he looked in every direction for signs that the surveillance cameras were back in operation. So far he’d avoided detection, but he knew it couldn’t last.

He realized the people he met were acting as cautious and guarded as he was.

He was nearing his neighborhood when he saw a barrier ahead. A chain
-
link fence had been erected around this section of the city, one of the seven areas destroyed in the rioting. He spotted two checkpoints
—
one to his left, the other to his right
—
both barely visible in the growing dusk. The miserable weather suddenly seemed like a blessing. The poor visibility would make it almost impossible for the inspection teams to see him at this distance.

Matt needed to get through this undetected.
But how?
he wondered. So far his luck seemed to be holding, but he was losing faith in luck.

He watched the lighted inspection points in the distance. He could see individuals handing over papers for examination and then being allowed to pass. Shards of light reflected off the wet pavement, creating a high
-
contrast, black
-
and
-
white, film noir effect. The weather was keeping people off the streets.