“There!” Cameron said. “Stop. Go back. Not the last pic you sent, the one before. Top left.”
The panel Cameron directed him to looked like the door of a breaker box, except that it was white, not gray. There was a keyhole beside the recessed handle. Hendricks tried the handle anyway, hoping for a bit of luck. It was locked, because of course it was.
“Hey,” the man headed toward him called, not angry yet, but agitated. He was taller than Hendricks by a few inches and well muscled beneath a layer of baby fat. He wore a tool belt low around his waist and soon was close enough-thirty yards or so-that Hendricks could make out its contents. Screwdrivers. Wire cutters. Voltmeter. Electrical tape. An assortment of pliers. They clanked and rattled as he walked.
Hendricks set his phone down atop the cell on wheels, reached into the right thigh pocket of his cargo pants, and took out Cameron’s electric toothbrush. He’d come across it when they were taking inventory of their belongings on the plane and couldn’t help but laugh. “What’s so funny?” Cameron had asked, reddening.
“Most outlaws aren’t so diligent about their oral hygiene,” he’d replied.
Hendricks had removed its brush head and filed down the metal spindle on the curb while Cameron doctored up his windbreaker. Now he carefully inserted it into the lock.
The man was twenty yards away, the cell on wheels between them, so Hendricks was partially obscured from his view. “Hey!” he shouted. This time, several people glanced up at them.
Hendricks thought, Please work, over and over, a silent mantra.
Hendricks was not a seasoned lock picker. Give him a set of rakes and torsion wrenches, and he’d get through a door eventually, but not with any speed or grace. Lock-bumping-in which a specially made key is inserted partway into a lock and then rapped with a mallet so that the vibration causes the pin stacks inside the lock to line up momentarily-was far more reliable for an amateur like him. But each make of lock required its own bump key, and the process was far from stealthy.
Thanks to recreational lock picking’s rise in popularity, Hendricks was able to learn a trick or two online. For instance, he’d found out that you could insert the spindle of an electric toothbrush into a lock and use its high-speed vibration like a computer hacker uses a brute-force attack. Instead of one rap of the mallet, one chance to turn the lock, the constant shaking knocks the pin stacks around until they line up just right.
At least, that was the theory. Until today, Hendricks had seen it only on YouTube. The guy who’d posted the video warned that the average electric toothbrush spindle was too short to work on a door lock and too thick to fit inside most keyholes. He’d also warned that if you filed the spindle down too far, it’d snap off and the lock would never open. But done right, he said, anyone could pick a lock this way, and to demonstrate, he’d popped open half a dozen padlocks, lockboxes, and storage lockers in seconds flat.
At the time, it had seemed impressive to Hendricks. Now he hoped he didn’t wind up getting caught because he’d been dumb enough to believe something he saw on the Internet.
The tech was fifteen yards away and agitated enough that he’d attracted the attention of some nearby personnel. Hendricks pressed the button on the handle of the toothbrush and winced as the motor hummed to life. The spindle rattled in the lock like pennies in a cup holder.
He held his breath.
Twisted the handle.
To his surprise, the lock opened.
Inside the panel was a keyboard. A bunch of lights, toggles, buttons, and ports. A small display screen, green writing on black background, lines of data scrolling by.
“I’m in,” he said quietly. He glanced up. Ten yards and closing fast.
“You see a USB port?”
“No,” he said. Her tense silence spoke volumes. “Wait-yes. What now?”
“Pop in the thumb drive that I gave you.”
“Done. Now what?”
“Is the screen giving you a prompt of any kind?”
“Uh…”
Cameron sighed. “Just show me.”
“How?”
“Jesus, you’re hopeless. Hang on.”
Hendricks’s burner began to vibrate atop the cell on wheels, spinning a minute or two clockwise with every pulse. He picked it up and clicked the notice. One of the apps Cameron had installed on it launched, and her face popped up on his screen. “Hold me up so I can see it,” she said. He complied. “Okay, listen carefully.”
She told him what to type. He set the phone back down and punched the characters into the keyboard, hunt-and-peck-style, with his index fingers. “Uh, the screen just went blank. Nothing but a blinking cursor in the top left corner.”
“That’s expected,” she said.
“What do I do now?”
“Nothing,” she said. “Once the exploit’s done uploading, remove the thumb drive, close the door, and get the eff outta Dodge.”
“How will I know the exploit’s done uploading?”
“Just watch the screen.”
“For what?”
“You’ll know it when you see it.”
“Uh, buddy?” The tech had reached the other side of the cell on wheels. “You want to tell me what the hell you think you’re doing?”
Hendricks eyed the screen. Then the tech. Then the screen again. Nothing on it had changed that he could see. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“I mean, why are you fucking around with my machine?” He began to circle around to Hendricks.
“Oh, that,” Hendricks said nonchalantly. “My signal keeps cutting out. I thought it’d get better the closer I got to the tower, but no such luck. So then I figured there’s gotta be some kind of knob on this thing somewhere that’ll turn it up. But the goddamn thing is locked.”
The corner braces forced the tech to swing a little wide. Otherwise, he would’ve seen the open panel door and called to the guards-who were already a little too interested in this exchange for Hendricks’s liking.
Hendricks glanced down. Saw the screen flicker. The code vanished, replaced by a message in block letters made of zeros:
HELLO MY NAME IS BESSIE
Then the message disappeared, and code began to scroll by once more.
Hendricks removed the thumb drive. Pocketed it, along with the electric toothbrush. Eased the panel door closed as the man rounded the corner. It locked automatically with a click.
The man had an ID badge on a lanyard around his neck declaring him to be Aaron Stanton of the NCSC-Homeland Security’s National Cybersecurity Center. “This thing’s locked for a reason.”
“Which is?”
“So morons who can’t stop the clock on their microwave from blinking twelve don’t fuck with it and knock out our whole damn communications network,” he said.
“Listen, asshole,” Hendricks said, affecting umbrage, “I’m not some dipshit off the street-I’m a special agent with the FBI.” He was always amazed at how well a little bit of swagger sold a flimsy grift.
“Oh. Sorry,” Stanton said, his words dripping sarcasm. “I didn’t realize you were a Feeb. I’ll try to talk slower.”
Hendricks leaned in close and grabbed Stanton’s ID badge. He made a show of scrutinizing it closely. “Hey!” Stanton exclaimed, snatching at it. “What the hell?”
“I want to make sure I spell your name right when I report you,” Hendricks replied.
“For what? Doing my job? You’re lucky I don’t report you. If you’d so much as pressed a button on this baby, I would’ve. So how about you get the fuck away from her before I change my mind?”
“Fine. Have it your way. I don’t have time for this bullshit.” Hendricks turned and walked off. Once it became clear the argument was over, the attention of the crowd began to wander. Stanton, though, was still suspicious. He looked the cell on wheels over carefully, even opening the panel door and checking inside.