Hyperventilation ensued.
Again.
One hand gripped the edge of the roof, the other hovered over the wire as it ran through the pulley gears, hoisting its load, ready to bear down if anything slipped out of place. But he wasn’t worried about the equipment. He was worried about the ground.
His earpiece beeped, and Eric’s voice came through, crystal clear. “Another load, coming up.”
“Hurry, please,” Schwarz begged. “Being up here is not good for my asthma.”
“Schwarz, you don’t have asthma.”
Oh.
Right.
The excuse worked wonders for getting out of the occasional stepfamily touch football game, as Carl Schwarzbaum could barely be bothered to remember that his oldest son still drew breath—much less which bronchial maladies kept that breath labored and far too short for football.
Eric, on the other hand, paid attention. Which made him significantly harder to fool.
“You ready to receive?” Eric asked.
Schwarz nodded. “Roger.” He drew in a deep, ragged breath, then leaned over, arms outstretched, waiting for the metal cage to appear out of the darkness. Max was still inside, preparing more loads for Eric, who would pack them securely and send them on their journey to the roof.
Where Schwarz waited. Trying not to look down.
It’s only two stories, he reasoned with himself. Not bad at all. Not dangerous. Not worthy of a panic attack. Not enough to make him dizzy and short of breath, to make his chest tighten and his palms sweat inside the rough leather gloves.
“Dawn Richard, May 1957,” he murmured. “Carrie Radison, pretty in pink. Jean Jani. Dolores Donlon. Jacqueline Prescott, Miss September. Colleen Farrington, in the bubble bath.” It helped, like it always did, like a bedtime story he told himself, chasing the monsters back into the shadows. “Miss November, Marlene Callahan, behind the door. Linda Vargas, by the fire. Elizabeth Ann Roberts, January 1958, a very happy new year.”
Just two stories. Not a long way down.
He could estimate the height and his mass, calculate the impact velocity, apply it to the standard bone density and tensile quantity of his muscles, calculate the probability of tears, breaks, demolition. Rationally, he knew that two stories was nothing.
But in the dark, the ground was impossible to see.
And it felt substantially farther away.
From the Oxford English Dictionary:
Hack, noun, most commonly meaning, “A tool or implement for breaking or chopping up. Variously applied to agricultural tools of the mattock, hoe, and pick-axe type.” First usage 1300 AD: “He lened him a-pon his hak, wit seth his sun us-gat he spak.”
I just wanted to understand. After it was all over, I just wanted to know what I’d missed, to get why it had meant so much. This didn’t help.
Other options:
“A gash or wound made by a cutting blow or by rough or clumsy cutting.”
“Hesitation in speech.”
“A short dry hard cough.”
Most uselessly: “An act of hacking; a hacking blow.”
And then, inching closer to paydirt, the seventh usage: “A spell of hacking on a computer… an act of gaining unauthorized access to a computer system.” First use 1983.
I showed Eric. He laughed. The date was ridiculous, he said.
The definition was useless, he said.
The term hack had been co-opted—falsely, offensively, clumsily—by the mainstream media, who thought writing about computer hacking masterminds would sell more papers.
He said.
According to Eric, hacking in its pure form stretched back centuries. It wasn’t restricted to a single medium. It was more than a methodology. It was an ethos.
“This is your problem,” Eric complained, tapping the computer screen. The Che Guevara action figure perched on top tilted and swayed, but declined to topple. Max had given it to him for his last birthday—“a revolutionary, for my favorite revolutionary”—and while it was intended as a joke, his prized position atop the computer screen suggested that for Eric, the mini-Che was equal parts entertainment and inspiration. “The OED is an outmoded technology.” He leaned over my shoulder, his forearm brushing against my cheek, and closed the window. Then, reaching around me with the other hand, so that I was trapped between his freckled arms, he opened Wikipedia and typed “hack” into the search box. “It’s dead, like the Encyclopædia Britannica. A bunch of old white guys sitting in a room deciding what’s true—it’s a dead end. That’s what this means—” He brushed his hand across the top of the monitor fondly, like it was a family pet. “The end of gatekeepers, the end of the fossilized system that depended on an ‘us’ and a ‘them,’ the knowledgeable and the ignorant. Communal knowledge, that’s what matters now. Not what they want us to know, but what we want to know. That’s the future.” He glanced up from the computer, up toward me. Behind the glasses, his eyes were huge. “Information wants to be free.”
“Schwarz is losing it,” Eric whispered. Thanks to his improvements, the mics were so sensitive that they picked up his every word. “Let’s speed this up.”
“Code names only,” Max reminded him. “We don’t know who might be monitoring this frequency. And whose idea was it to stick Grunt on the roof?”
“Mine. And it was a good one.” Eric flipped channels back to Schwarz, hoping he was right. “You still with us up there?”
“Susie Scott, Sally Sarell. Miss April, Linda Gamble. Ginger Young on the bed. Delores Wells on the beach, Teddi Smith, Miss—”
“Schwarz!”
“Ready for Phase Three.” The voice was pinched and nasal, with a hint of a whine. As usual. “Can you, um, please go faster?”
“We’re working on it.”
And back to Max.
“Last load,” Max confirmed. “Hoist it up, Chuckles, and I’ll meet you and Grunt on the roof in five.”
Eric began unhooking the metal grips and threading the wires back through, winding them in a tight coil. His cheeks burned in the wind. Unlike Max, he wore neither all black nor a mask for their missions, trusting the darkness to protect him—and, failing that, trusting the intruder alert sensors, which could never fail, because he had designed them himself. Max dressed for drama; Schwarz dressed however Max told him to. But Eric dressed for efficiency, flexibility, comfort, and speed. A gray T-shirt inside out, its faded message pressed to his skin: IF YOU’RE NOT OUTRAGED, YOU’RE NOT PAYING ATTENTION. His lucky socks, sneakers, Red Sox cap, and cargo pants—stuffed with lockpick, RF jammer, micro-scanner set to the police frequency, pliers, extra wire coils, a house key. He carried no ID. Just in case. If he missed something on the scanner, if their detectors failed, and a car pulled into the lot without advance warning, if someone, somewhere, heard something, and a cop appeared, there was always the all-purpose backup plan.
Ditch the equipment.
Forget the mission.
Run.
“Explain to me again why I have to be Chuckles and you get to be Cobra Commander?” Eric asked Max, hooking the line to his belt and giving it two quick tugs. There was a grinding sound, and then the ground fell away beneath him as the mechanism hoisted him up. He grazed his fingers against the brick facade; it scraped and tickled as the wires hauled him up to the roof.
It was nothing like flying.
“Because you always make me laugh,” Max replied in a syrupy sweet voice. “At least, your face does.”