Crushed, p.21
Crushed, page 21
The iPhone powers down.
All areas of my peripheral vision go black.
Did I not charge it? No, and it charged the entire drive here. Fuck!
The phone is charged, but I throw open the car door and place it on the charging rest in my car.
A large white Apple logo and multi-lingual welcome screen appears. My skin, my blood, my bones—all go cold.
The screen door slams closed. Vivi smiles. There’s a bag over her shoulder and a bounce in her step. I jump out of the car and pop open the trunk.
I open my laptop. A message pops up. The Gmail password is incorrect. Please enter your four-digit password.
“Fuck!” I scream.
“What’s wrong?” She glances at my screen. “Do you not remember?”
“Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck,” I chant. The box of burner phones sits before me, and I grab one, quickly dialing Kairi’s number.
“What’s wrong?” Vivi asks again, still chipper.
“I didn’t set up a four-digit number,” I grit out. This is beyond bad. This is fucked.
“Hey,” Kairi answers.
“Check everything. We’re under attack. I’m on my way.”
I slam the trunk closed, and a second later, a car door closes. I lean into my car and stare at Vivi.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m going with you.” She pulls the loop on her seatbelt over her, snapping it in place.
“Like hell you are.”
“No, I am. Or you can leave, and I’ll follow.”
“You don’t know where I’d go.”
“You’d go to Kairi’s vineyard, right? That’s who you just called. Do you want me in your car or following you?”
Memories of the last attack surface. The gun, the knife, the blood. Tiny black dots appear. I can’t.
A mechanical snap sounds. She directs me. Hands on my arms. She pushes me down into a seat. The passenger seat. The door shuts. She’s in the driver’s seat. The seat moves forward, then up. She adjusts the rearview mirror.
“Lean forward. Put your head between your legs.” What is Vivi saying? “I spoke to Kairi. She says to bring you. She hasn’t found anything yet, but she’s looking. She and Trevor are on the lookout. She doesn’t see anything yet. Here’s your phone if you want to call her.”
“Wait…what?” Small businesses pass through the window. The blue sky, mailboxes awkwardly lined up along a busy country road.
“Kairi says I don’t need to call the cops. But we can call nine-one-one. Do you think we should?”
“No. No. The attack could all be…” The thundering in my head eases. “No. This attack is virtual. If it was physical, they wouldn’t tip me off by hijacking my phone. They shut everything down. But Kairi…” I lift the burner phone, redialing.
Vivi grips the steering wheel with both hands. She sounds calm. Her attention is on the road. But, Jesus, if he hurts her, I’ll kill him in the vilest manner conceivable.
“Erik?” Kairi questions through the phone line. “Are you okay? Vivi said—”
“I’m fine. I had a moment. Just…what are you seeing?”
“Nothing. Everything’s normal.” Concern colors Kairi’s tone.
“My phone powered down. It’s hijacked. It’s my personal one. Tied to my real name.” Everything Kairi is monitoring is blanketed with aliases and untraceable accounts. “My laptop’s hijacked too. You’re monitoring the security cameras, right?”
“Trevor’s on that.”
“Wolf’s still in SB. Right?” I ask for confirmation.
“Yes.”
Shit. Maybe he’s been watching. Maybe he knows we’re down our strongest defense player.
“He’s on his way back. Which number got hijacked?” The clatter of keystrokes sounds through the phone, the sound oddly soothing and calming. My palms are sweaty, and I wipe them one by one on my jeans.
“My personal.” I tell her the number in case she doesn’t have it memorized. “Do you think he’s just fucking with us? Letting me know he’s traced us?”
“I don’t know. Just get here. It might not be him. I’m not seeing anything right now.”
“No unusual error reports?”
“No.” She sounds annoyed. “Are you tweeting right now?”
“No.” My face twists in frustration at Kairi’s asinine question. Focus, woman.
“Should we fear hackers? Intention is at the heart of the discussion.”
“What?” Has she lost her mind?
“Your account just tweeted that.”
What the ever-loving fuck?
I grab Vivi’s phone. I need to see this bullshit for myself. She’s got every app open. Her interface is a colossal, disorganized mess. I click, click, click. Give up. Pull down for search, type in Twitter, locate the app, and track down my accounts.
MAKE IT HAPPEN
Vivi
* * *
My heart rate spikes in a way it’s never, ever spiked. The pads of my fingers tingle, and it’s not sexual. It’s nerve-wracking. It’s a stomach twisted in knots, touching a live wire and jumping back, shocked and in pain kind of tingle.
Erik seems to have recovered from his panic attack, but he’s pale, and he’s wiping his palms flat out on his jeans over and over. This is insanity.
“Why don’t you call the police?” I practically screamed at Kairi. Seeing Erik bent over, barely able to breathe, scared the living daylights out of me. Whatever he fears…it’s bad. It’s really, really, really bad.
Kairi said they’re basically the police. But do the police have panic attacks? I can’t imagine Erik ever holding a gun. He doesn’t look like the type. Kairi said they are the ones to call when this happens.
“Just get him here.” That’s what she ended with. So, I’m driving like a lunatic in Erik’s Tesla, and that’s when the alert lights the screen in the middle of the car that he has twenty miles left before we need to recharge.
The address to Kairi’s is already entered. I know how to go there, but I entered it to double-check myself. If there’s a wreck or something, I want to be rerouted. And she’s fifteen miles away.
“We’re fine. We’ll make it. Just don’t use the auto drive.” Erik says.
I nod, and he picks my phone up and dials, presumably to call someone other than Kairi, because she basically kicked him off the phone. How he remembers so many phone numbers is mind-boggling. If my phone powered down, I could call no one. That’s how many numbers I have memorized other than my own. Or, well, I suppose I remember the farmhouse landline phone number. I grew up in that house and had to learn it for school.
As I turn right onto the gravel drive that winds through Kairi’s family property, Erik is dialing yet another number. I’ve noticed he has alternated between using my phone and the temporary burner phone he had in the back of his car. For some reason, it doesn’t bother me at all that the guy I’m seeing, the guy who just told me he loves me, carries a box of burner phones around like a common drug dealer. Or, at least, I’ve never met a drug dealer, but I’ve heard they use burner phones. I asked Erik why he did that, and he mumbled to himself, not to me, an answer. I suspect he can’t decide what’s safer.
And that right there is what has me on edge. When I park beside an old, rusted pickup truck, I don’t know what awaits us. If an assassin dressed in all black with a face mask is on the way, or if some thug with an AK-47 is going to pull up and blast through the back of the house. Either scenario feels conceivable.
Erik jumps out of the car, dashing toward the back door, his laptop and phone clutched to his side. I am slower getting out of the car. For one, I’m not even sure how to turn this car off. I’m looking for a button or lever.
“Come on,” Erik shouts.
“How do I—”
“Just get out of the car. It turns off on its own.” Weird.
He waits for me as I round the car. His expression is cold. But he’s not mad. His brain is off in another stratosphere. He’s physically present in the driveway, but ninety-five percent of his thought processes are in an alternative plane. I’ve seen it before from The Bookery. His focus is otherworldly. But, right now, what I’m seeing isn’t healthy. Not being able to breathe, what I saw back there, which I am positive was a panic attack, isn’t healthy.
He presses against my back and pushes me forward, rushing me into the house. I see him scan the sky as if he expects to see a helicopter or a drone. The door slams behind us, and Erik is off. I’ve never been inside this house before. It isn’t Kairi’s family home. I think it’s just a house on the property. Lots of vineyards have these random houses sprinkled about. Maybe at one time family members or someone on staff lived in them, or maybe they were built with the exclusive purpose of garnering additional income as a rental. There are no photographs. The art hanging on the wall is faded and in cheap frames. It’s the kind of art one buys in Home Goods or Bed, Bath & Beyond. The walls are painted beige. It’s a drab color people around here liked around 2005 to 2010. The place needs a fresh coat of paint and some TLC.
Controlled shouting floats up the stairs. The layered emotion reminds me that if someone is about to storm the building with machine guns, then the color on the walls is immaterial.
I follow the shouts down a narrow stairwell into a basement. The carpet is a short shag in an off-putting brown. It’s a depressing color combination.
Peals of laughter echo through the fake wood paneled hallway.
“Dumbass!” Trevor shouts.
Kairi is laughing so hard she’s bent over, holding her sides as if she’s cramping. I guess this means no one is going to storm the building, but I say nothing. Erik has one hand over his eyes, his glasses raised on his forehead, and a half-grimace, half-smile across his lips.
“What’s going on?” Laughter has to be a good sign.
“It’s not Kane,” Trevor tells me as he paces the room, smiling. “Your lover boy, Mr. Cautious, used an ancient Twitter account to tweet his dissatisfaction about a restaurant delivery.”
This is so over my head, but I don’t want to come across as the dumbest person in the room. “And so they hacked his phone?”
“No. Well, not the restaurant people. He has a three-digit Twitter account.”
Erik stares out the window. He’s gripping a chunk of his hair. I don’t get it. At all.
“There’s a group of hackers out there who covet three-digit Twitter accounts. And guess what this schmuck’s account was?” I don’t bother guessing…there’s no point. “OG1.”
Okay.
“It stands for original gangster one.” Kairi explains it like I’m five. She should maybe shoot for three. “He hasn’t used it in ages, but he has a shit ton of followers. So, when he unleashed his annoyance at SlapJack’s for getting his order wrong, it was like awakening a monster. They knew he’d just ordered from SlapJack’s. And he’d ordered online, so they located his food order. From there, so easy.”
I rock back on my heels as I piece it together. Now both of Erik’s hands are on his head.
“All you need is a billing address and the last four digits of a credit card number to change your Apple password. They just locked him out of his phone and computer to disable him so they could hijack his Twitter account. It’s probably some twenty-something yokel. But he’ll be able to sell that Twitter handle for…what do you say?” Trevor directs his question to Kairi. “Ten K? Fifteen?”
“I have no idea.” She falls back against the sofa cushions. Then she snaps her fingers. “Wolf. We’ve got to tell him. He’s gonna be wheels up any minute.”
Slowly, I move through the living space, stepping over wires and bypassing an empty pizza box to join Kairi on the sofa.
“So…if this guy located Erik, does that mean this other guy can locate him?”
Erik spins around and answers. “No. That Twitter account pre-dates college. He wouldn’t connect it. It’s from, like, 2006. I didn’t even think about what name or account I tied it to. It’s an unbelievably stupid mistake.”
Trevor and Kairi may find it humorous, but I can tell Erik does not. He’s shaken, still pale. I approach him with caution and wrap my arms around him. Pressure from his chin falls on the top of my head. Worry leaks out of him, ever so slowly, like icing from a piping bag.
“Dude, it was nothing. She’s fine. There was never any danger.” Trevor sounds exasperated. But I witnessed the panic attack. I sensed the extreme fear. Trevor might think this is funny, but I don’t see the humor. Not when there’s a tremor vibrating through Erik.
Erik pulls himself together, and he and Trevor go into an adjacent room to talk with Wolf. I follow Kairi up to the kitchen to get us all something to drink. I have an idea that’s been percolating, and it occurs to me that not only does Erik need this, but she’s the one who can help me make it happen.
I AM PHOENIX
Vivi
* * *
Erik frowns when I insist on taking the Range Rover. It’s a gas guzzler, and he prefers his car. But I plan on driving, and I don’t want to deal with finding charging stations. The only thing I’ve told him is that I’m taking him away for a holiday and it’s a surprise.
“I don’t like surprises,” he grumbles, but that’s all he does. And that’s one reason I know he needs to get away. He needs a break. No one can live on the run forever. Eventually, your legs give out.
He says nothing as I pack my clothes. Even more worrisome, he says nothing as I pack his clothes. He sits in a chair by the pool, hands crossed over his chest, still. Every time I glance out the window, he’s in the same position.
It’s all the things he’s not saying, all the questions he’s not asking, that gnaw away at me. When I went over my plan with Kairi and then Trevor, they asked plenty of questions.
“Will it be remote?”
“How are you getting there?”
“Does it have Internet access?”
Kairi verged on ecstatic as she helped me pull this off. After I discovered some dear friends were out of town, and I could stay at their home in Newport Ranch, everything fell into place at warp speed. While I schemed, Erik located the pissant hacker—his words. He’d confirmed that, yes, the guy did not know who he was. He held “no heat” against him. Erik and Trevor considered a counterattack.
“We could nuke him,” Trevor flippantly says as I join them in Kairi’s living room. Upon seeing me, he offers an explanation. “Nuke his accounts. Wipe his computers clean. Erase everything.”
“Oh.” I’d searched Erik’s expression for a hint of amusement, entertainment, something. If he felt anything, he hid it beneath layers of frustration that he’d slipped up. Trevor and Kairi didn’t see his reaction. But I had…and when I told Kairi, she agreed he needed a break.
“We’ve been at this nonstop for so long. Did he tell you?”
“Tell me what?”
“About the attack. About…” Emotion choked her words. I’d reached for Kairi, touched her, letting her know she didn’t need to go on.
“He told me some.”
“We’ve been nonstop since. And then he found us, and we came here, and…”
“You’re still scared?”
“I don’t want to be. I want to believe we’re safe. I want to believe you are safe if you stay with Erik.”
I want to believe it, too. Safe or not, I plan on staying with Erik. When I believed the absolute worst might happen, my instinct wasn’t to run away. It was to stay by Erik, to support him.
Trevor cleared the Newport Ranch location. The home we will be staying in is a part of the resort, but it’s isolated. We shouldn’t have any reason to leave the resort. Twenty miles of hiking trails, astounding ocean views, and a place to decompress. Erik needs to decompress.
Really, they all do, although for some reason Kairi and Trevor seem to take it better than Erik. Or maybe I just don’t know them as well. Maybe one has to know someone well to identify his fault lines.
José had been more than willing to take over The Bookery. It was funny…I’d gone so long being the only employee. And José had come along and hired multiple sales assistants in a matter of weeks. This would be my first vacation since opening the shop. Erik and I both need this getaway.
Headlights from an oncoming car flash from the transition of high beam to low. Erik stirs beside me. He has been asleep since I merged onto the 101. And silent before that. I wonder if panic attacks wipe someone out…maybe they wipe someone out in a similar way that someone can wipe a computer. His unnerving silence certainly makes me think so.
His seat raises. He wipes his eyes, shifting his heavy frames up to his brow.
“Where are we?”
“Close to our destination.”
“Still not going to tell me where we’re going?”
“Nope.” I grin. It’s good he’s talking. He’s awake and interacting.
“Did I ever tell you I don’t like surprises?”
“Huh. Maybe once or twice. But that can’t be true. Everyone likes surprises.”
He gives me a look that both disagrees and conveys his opinion that my idea is lunacy. Fine, whatever.
Minutes later, a light ahead shines on the wood carved sign for The Inn at Newport Ranch.
“California?” he asks. I nod. “Nice.”
“Have you been here before?” I doubt it. I wonder where he thought I’d be taking him. We’re in a car. The reasonable options are limited.
“Newport Ranch? No.”
“It’s technically Fort Bragg. This is a resort. Friends own it. We don’t have to see any of the other guests if that’s your preference. We’re staying in a house away from everything else.”
“A house? For us?” I purposefully turn my head to minimize the risk of giving anything else away. Yes, he said he doesn’t like surprises. But I can’t resist keeping the best surprise from him. I am literally giddy.
I park the car and hop out onto the pavement. From the back here, the house doesn’t look like much. Or, rather, it looks like a jigsaw one-story home covered in faded driftwood. He carries our tote bags in over one shoulder, and I hunt for the lights. This home isn’t technically a part of the resort, but when my friends are out of town, they’ll rent it out. The eucalyptus aroma that greets us lets me know they’ve had their staff go through and give the place the guest treatment. It smells like a spa, and I’m not surprised at all to see they set the kitchen up for guests. Coffee and tea options are laid out, and a basket of fruit, nuts, crackers, and cookies. I’ll have to tell Lesedi she’s outdone herself.
