The Final Day (After, #3)(52)

“Froze my ass off up on the roof in this damn weather,” Ernie growled. “Samantha, that’s your job from now on.”

He tapped the shoulder of one of the girls sitting in front of an Apple screen. The young woman’s hair was unruly, pulled back in a ponytail, and definitely needed a good washing. John remembered her as someone who had been quietly defined as 4-F for service with the college’s militia due to asthma and a propensity for catching any bug floating around and had been down with pneumonia more than once. If not for the town’s production of antibiotics, the last bout would have killed her. She had finally been tasked with helping to weave the wire for the generators being produced down in Anderson Hall and was doing a rather poor job even with that, but now she apparently had found her niche.

“Ernie, you keep this girl out of the cold,” Linda said protectively. “She’s needed more right here.”

“So I freeze at my age, and she sits here snug and warm.”

“Just shut up and leave her be.”

Even as the two started to argue, Samantha pointed at the screen where an endless stream of numbers and letters without any semblance of order or reason were cascading down at a near-blinding rate at times. “There it is again, same pattern.” Samantha hit a button on the keypad, which froze the image with an old-fashioned screen capture.

Ernie leaned over her shoulder to look.

“What is it?” John asked, curiosity filling him.

“Encrypting,” Ernie announced, continuing to stare at the screen.

“Bluemont?”

“No way of knowing yet. If we were sitting on top of a hill looking down at the Bluemont facility, that would be easy enough. Aim a little eavesdropping antenna at one of theirs and start listening in. Most people just assumed everything on computers just flashed around on fiber optics or microwaves, but a lot was going up and down as well, especially government stuff, and of course it was encrypted. You have the right software on your computer, and what looks like gibberish in raw form becomes standard text.

“Do you remember Kindles? You buy a book, and thirty seconds later it’s in your computer, but what was sent was not the actual real text and photos; it was all encrypted to keep hackers from snatching it and then torrenting it out on their own.”

“Torrenting?”

“The bane of every author, for starters. Easy, actually. Some bum just scans the text of a book into his computer and then just put it out there as a PDF file. They make a buck or two, the author gets ripped off. Go downstairs and ask my daughter’s husband about it, and he’ll start raving like a crazy man about getting robbed of hundreds of thousands of dollars from torrenting.”

Ernie continued to stare at the screen while talking. “All those Internet sources for books, music—like Kindle, Nook, iTunes—were dependent on encrypting, and they were damn good at it and were updating their codes almost daily. So that is what we’ve got to get around.”

John looked at the other screens. The color one that Linda was sitting in front of was actually showing a wavering video image filled with static.

“And that?”

Linda smiled. “Raw feed from the BBC. Off-the-air stuff. A reporter somewhere up in Canada cursing about getting kicked out of the country. Stuff like that is going out all the time.”

“Can we talk to him?” John asked hopefully.

Linda shook her head. “We don’t have any kind of uplink here, just listening.”

“Should we get our ham operator guys to try to establish contact with them?”

“Already doing that,” Ernie replied.

“Remember one of them talked with us several days after we snatched that Black Hawk,” Maury interjected. “Then nothing. We can only run the radio in the chopper for so long before we have to fire it up to recharge.”

John looked around at the equipment scattered on the table—boxes of additional equipment, computer boards, old empty mini-frame stacks, heavy-duty backup batteries that used to be standard external equipment for most home computers so that if the power blinked off the battery kept the system running. John spared a glance into the open door of a bedroom across the hall and saw where there were yet more boxes piled up, some of them stamped Montreat College.

A couple of more students whom he had vague recollection of once being in his classes were in that room, leaning over a ubiquitous green computer board, probing at it with a voltmeter.

John caught Ernie’s eye and motioned for him to follow, not sure where to go until Ernie gestured toward a back room, a spacious affair, and within were yet more boxes, stripped-down computers, television monitors, some flat screens, others old-style heavy fourteen-and sixteen-inch monitors. There was barely room for a desk and a couple of chairs, with Ernie gesturing for John to sit down in one, while from under the desk he pulled out a bottle of brandy, opened it, and without asking poured a couple of ounces into two rather dingy-looking glasses.

John did not argue the point this time and was glad for the warmth of the drink coursing through him seconds later. Ernie also pulled out a cigar and looked to John quizzically at least for this offer. John reluctantly refused, and Ernie shrugged, bit off the end of his smoke, produced an old-fashioned friction match, and lit it up, the blue smoke curling around John.

“Something bothering you?” Ernie asked.

John wasn’t sure how to start as he sipped his drink. “For starters, I finally relented and said it was okay to recruit a couple of kids for this scheme of yours. Then I find out you all but hijacked the equipment from the college library basement and hauled it all over here without a by-your-leave. I now see five or more kids working here. Where did you get them from?”