The CleanSweep Conspiracy Page 2

  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.

  He turned slightly to his right. His luck was holding, at least for the moment. Matt saw something odd about the fence. There was a hole in a section of chain link, offering a way through like an invitation. So he wasn’t the first one wanting to get through without being noticed. He forced back the urge to run to the opening.

  Looking in both directions to see if anyone was watching him, Matt walked slowly over and pulled back the corners of the severed fence. The weather, his ally, allowed him to walk unnoticed. He passed still-smoldering buildings, structures with broken windows that stood as mute testimony to the rioting that had taken place only days earlier.

  Now he only wanted to find a way to cross over the Don River. The Old Eastern Avenue Bridge turned out to be just right.

  A driving, cold wind blew as he finally reached his destination—a red-brick apartment building near the lakeshore. Dating to 1937, the art deco design should have made the building trendy and cool, like the neighborhood. It failed to meet the challenge. The brickwork lacked tuck-pointing, it boasted unpainted window frames, and a pile of trash leaned against the side of the front steps.

  Once he made it inside, Matt’s nose recoiled. A dank odor from years of neglect and mold welcomed him as he stepped into the lobby and looked up at the panels of wallpaper trying to hang on to the wall for dear life. Adding to the dreary setting were mismatched labels of taped-up signs and washed-out names scrawled with magic marker that decorated the recessed bank of mailboxes. Only one retained its original etched-brass plate. It declared that a Mrs. Simmons lived in 403. It was rumored, they said, that Mrs. Simmons had moved in when the building was brand-new and had remained an occupant ever since. No one recalled ever seeing Mrs. Simmons, but her mailbox never overflowed.

  Matt walked past the mailboxes, stepping over holes in the threadbare carpeting. At the end of the dim hallway, near the rear of the ground-floor lobby, he unlocked the door that led to the basement. He glanced over his shoulder to make sure no one was watching. Snapping on the light switch, he started down the steeply sloping steps, closing the door behind him. At the bottom, he walked to another doorway, ducking under heating vents as he went, brushing ghostly cobwebs aside. Inside a small room, he unfastened yet another door located in a corner, almost out of sight in the low lighting.

  With a single bulb hanging on the end of a braided wire, it looked like a place that hadn’t seen visitors in a long, long time.

  Matt had made a deal with the building’s super in exchange for a certain monthly sum of money; he was the only resident who’d ever been given access to the basement. He doubted the super passed any of the monthly payment along to the property management company. That was fine with him; Matt wanted privacy, and the super’s duplicity helped to ensure it.

  Still, to be extra cautious, Matt always left a “tell” at the door to this basement space when he left—a security tip-off—something small to let him know if the super or anyone else had been snooping around where they didn’t belong. This time it was a simple piece of Scotch tape near the floor that was stuck across the edge of the door and the jamb. It was intact, the way he had left it.

  No one had entered since he’d last been down there. Matt stepped through the door to his hidey-hole, and into a much different part of the cellar. It was like stepping through a time warp. He left the 1937 art deco world behind and stepped into a room that was air-conditioned to a very precise temperature and dehumidified to keep moisture from attacking his expansive array of computers and equipment. This was his electronic operations center, vital to his blogging efforts. He looked around, careful to examine other telltale traps he’d left, and was finally convinced the room was, indeed, exactly as he’d left it. There had been no visitors.

  He sat down in front of the primary monitor. His shoulders slumped forward as he relaxed for the first time since receiving the SOS message on his phone. Then he leaned back and stretched out, and his chin dropped to his chest. When he finally opened his eyes and looked around, the clock winked 11:13.

  “Is it nighttime? Could that much time have passed?”

  He adjusted a lamp overhead, typed a few words, and waited for his message to bounce from one location to the next, to arrive at his intended target sites, which took an agonizing eternity of several seconds. He forced patience, knowing his teammates would still be awake and alert, despite living in a variety of time zones.

  Matt and Cyberia had cautiously recruited associates to their online team, like-minded members from around the world. Over time, they became intimates. Connected by their words, each had pledged alle
giance to the truth, though they never thought to give the group a name.

  Dobroye utro, the first reply message winked on the screen. It was Gennady, the Russian—screen name Cyberia. He was quickly followed by the others.

  Ubari logged on from somewhere in Africa. Lake Devil logged on from her undisclosed location in Florida, to be joined by Chin from Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province in southwest China. Questions about precise addresses were never asked. They were best kept secret for the safety of all.

  Except for Cyberia, the others knew Matt only by his alias: Veritas.

  In spite of the dehumidifier working at maximum effort, Matt felt a trickle of sweat under his arms. His nerves felt raw and exposed.

  They’re on to you, Cyberia typed. It’s the same here. It won’t be long until I hear footsteps at my own door. It’s just like the ghost of Stalin rising from the grave. His words were stripped bare of his usual humor.

  It is worse than we thought, Ubari added.

  Lake Devil and Chin remained silent, not needing to restate the obvious.

  I don’t know what to do, Matt typed. With those words, he succumbed to shock and started to shake as tears formed and rolled down his cheeks.

  Hang in there, dude. We will talk later. It was Lake Devil, reminding everyone they had reached the maximum limit of two minutes of connectivity, set as a safeguard that they hoped wouldn’t allow anyone time to trace their communications.

  As Matt watched, his screen friends disappeared from view. He had never felt so alone or afraid.

  He looked to his right, at one of the wood panels that lined the wall. If anyone really looked, they would see it was different from the rest. There was a slight curl at the upper left corner. Matt stood and pulled at the corner. A second door to the room was concealed behind it.