He’d been on the road all morning, speeding across the desert floor on an empty little highway that meandered between two cacti-lined mountain ridges. A perfect start to the day, renting and subsequently abusing a sporty red Mustang, its throaty roar sounding as he gunned it further and further away from the glamorous artificiality of Vegas. Away from the people of the hacking convention. Away from people in general.

He was glad to be heading north on increasingly quiet highways, passing through increasingly barren towns that were spaced farther and farther apart. These new surroundings, the real Nevada, the desert, brought him an odd sense of relief. It came back like a nagging injury, surprising yet familiar. Comfortable, even, like an old pair of shoes.

Back in the Middle East, he’d spend a few minutes out of each day making a solemn personal promise that he’d never again, for the rest of his life, find himself in a desert.

But there he was, behind his car at the edge of the road for a bathroom break, staring across miles of shimmering sand under a huge blue sky. He was about two hundred miles north of Vegas, standing amongst a patch of yucca and Joshua trees that went sprawling up a mountainside. There he was, under that killer sun again, where he came to the sad realization that the heat of Nevada—aside from Las Vegas—felt more like home than his current one of Washington D.C.

It was a real kick in the ass.

Back behind the wheel, he began to sweat. Two minutes in the sun was all it took for him to remember the July he’d spent in Basra. By 9 a.m., he had no other choice but to roll up the windows and crank on the air conditioning—which brought back memories of Las Vegas. His car had now become the oasis in the desert, a traveling bubble of inexplicable air-conditioned comfort. The droning coolness made him sleepy and his eyelids felt the added weight of last night’s sleep deprivation, of Tansy feeling the wrath of Vegas being Vegas. His friends, being who they were, somehow convinced Tansy that the DEFCON after-party would be worth his while, and then another after-the-after-party at some other place down the strip, plus a mini poker tournament, and then. . . .

What else was there? He was sure there was more to it. He had the wristbands and hand stamps to prove it in the morning, evidence of a properly debauched night in Vegas. Wasn’t that what it was all about?

Maybe it would’ve been if Tansy was still twenty-one. And if he hadn’t the morbid privilege of seeing the naked fragility of life. He’d seen it up close in the battlefield, the fickleness of it all, where everything hinged on the most minute equations: the inches of bullet wounds, iota of seconds. And where he and his men would ultimately find themselves pushed up against the ragged edge of existence itself.

It was an education.

One of its lessons—and something that he’d have to reprogram his brain for—was that his life actually was a gift. He’d gone through an institutionalized adolescence knowing otherwise, that he wasn’t anything, certainly not anything special. It was the type of knowledge one might get from a dysfunctional upbringing following a traumatic divorce, which was then capped by a lengthy stint or two at youth-detention facilities. Through those facilities, and through whatever school he attended, the message had always been the same. And while it was quiet and sometimes maddeningly subtle, it was a message nonetheless. A pervasive one, even. One that whispered from all angles at once.

Boot camp reinforced the message of mind-numbing mediocrity, that he was a robotized piece of meat, that he was nobody. That was how they trained, and so Tansy excelled. He thrived. He didn’t know any better.

CAUTION

SLOW

A cluster of temporary road signs plucked him away from his thoughts. He’d been driving for so long and in such barren scenery, coming across anything other than an open road felt like a major event. In this case, it was a small line of cars—a Nevada traffic jam—backed up at a roadblock. Tansy coasted to a stop behind an old dusty pickup truck, threw the car in park, and waited for an approaching highway patrol officer. He noticed other signs while waiting, one digital display board reading, “NO UNLAWFUL ENTRY.”

It was an odd sentiment.

Was there a lawful entry? And would Tansy be allowed to do so?

As far as he understood, it was a public road. As far as he knew, it was illegal and unconstitutional to—

“What’s going on, Officer?” he asked, turning off his air conditioning at the same time he rolled the window down. The rush of heat was immediate and harsh.

“Road’s closed,” said the officer, a kid much younger than Tansy with a crew cut.

“Why?”

“Public safety. We’ve got an ongoing active shooter situation, and we can’t let civilian traffic into the theater.”

Times like these it paid off to be a marine. “Are you former military?” Tansy asked, hoping he could get some real talk with someone who looked and sounded like a soldier. The way he described it as a theater. . . .

“No, sir. Highway patrol.”

Never mind, then.

Tansy drummed his thumbs against the steering wheel, thinking. “Damn . . . I’m just trying to get up to Ely.”

“Well, you’ll have to turn around.” The officer stood next to the car, squinting in the sun while instructing Tansy to head back down to Crystal Springs, and to take a left on ninety-three, and then—

“So what’s going on up there?” Tansy interrupted. “Some kind of shootout?”

The officer pulled his sunglasses off his hat and slipped them on his bored, emotionless face. “An active shooter situation, sir.”

“You already said that.”

The officer wished Tansy a nice day before turning his back and walking off. He stopped at each car along the way to the barricade, saying something to the drivers. Tansy rolled up his window and watched as the officer gestured for the other drivers to turn around.

While the officer said he wasn’t former military, the barricade certainly looked the part. Along with several police cruisers were two large and imposing MRAP vehicles, tanks on wheels that could withstand mortars and land mines. Tansy knew them well. Maybe even too well, having ridden too many times down too many IED-filled highways in Iraq. He could even distinguish their model and manufacture date. The real mystery was why they were being used on American soil, against Americans.

Tansy made a quick U-turn, kicking up some dust along the road’s shoulder, before speeding away from the checkpoint. He looked back in his rearview mirror a moment later, still able to make out the distinctive militant shape of the black MRAPs. They were beyond overkill. And that was only for a checkpoint. What were they using on the real bad guys down the road?

* * *

Against his mounting annoyance, Tansy had backtracked to the junction at Crystal Springs. And as the officer kindly suggested, tried his luck with a highway that ran parallel with the previous, barricaded route. As luck would have it, the “active shooter situation” hadn’t spread across twenty miles of barren desert, and thus Tansy’s travels were so far unimpeded by additional roadblocks and MRAPs.

He eventually pulled off the highway for a gas station, a barely standing relic in a tiny, dust-swept town.

A ghost town, if it weren’t for all the news trucks.

They were camped out along the single block of Main Street, their various reporters wandering from van to van with coffees and cameras in tow. It was reminiscent of a classic Washington D.C. media circus. You couldn’t drive around the District without coming across at least one per day. But this was Parsnip, Nevada, not the nation’s capital.

He parked at the edge of town before getting out on foot to survey the scene, taking note of the various major national networks as he walked by each van. Through brief snippets of conversations, and from the competing noise of radio broadcasts, he was able to glean only one common narrative about the developing “active shooter” story—which was that no one knew what the hell was going on.

Tansy tried asking a local, the elderly gentleman sitting in a chair behind the counter at the gas station. Because elderly gentlemen in small towns always knew what the hell was going on.

“Heck if I know,” was his whistly-voiced response. He was probably just happy to sell so much gas and shitty coffee.

Outside, on “main street,” Tansy tried his luck with a guy who looked newsy enough yet still adequately schlubby, a goateed tech guy with a large set of headphones around his neck and a cigarette in his mouth. “I dunno,” he mumbled through his cigarette. “Something about an active shoo—”

“Okay, thanks,” Tansy interrupted, desperately unwilling to hear the buzz phrase of the day repeated for the hundredth time. “Do you guys have a police scanner in your van?”

The guy seemed a little suspicious. “Who are you with?” he asked.

“No one. Just myself.”

“So why do you care about a police scanner?”

“I’m just looking for the news, like you.” Tansy offered the guy a candy bar. Fresh from the gas station, it still felt cool in his hand. “So what are they saying on there?”

He was looking at the candy bar. “Uh, no, that’s okay . . . I don’t want that.”

Tansy shrugged and opened the wrapper. “It wasn’t a bribe; I was just being nice.” He took a satisfying bite of chocolate. “So, what’s the word on the scanner?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing?”

“They hide all the important stuff on a private channel or something.”

“Oh, come on,” Tansy said, his mouth still full of chocolate.

“What?”

“You guys don’t monitor that stuff?”

“How? It’s blocked.”

Tansy laughed. “What if we unblocked it?”

“Isn’t that illegal?”

“Listen, uh,”—he wrapped up the half-eaten snack and slid it into a cargo pocket on his shorts—“are you on a break or something?”

The guy took a puff from his cigarette.

“Okay. So on your break, let’s say you wanted to play around on your scanner. Alright? If you wanted to do that, could you then bring it over here and it wouldn’t be a big deal?”

“Who are you again?”

“Seriously, I’m just a guy. I’m just curious.”

“And why would I do this?”

“Because you might get a good scoop. Isn’t that what it’s all about?”

“Not for me. I just film what they tell me to film.” He dropped his cigarette and stepped on it. “But I’ll tell you what. There’s a bomb-ass taqueria place just down the road a few miles.”

“Oh, yeah?” Tansy was shocked at his sudden turn, and pleased. But he didn’t have time to make yet another detour.

“Don Pedro’s,” he said. “Come back here with a chorizo breakfast burrito and I’ll see what I can do.”

“Hmm . . . I don’t think I’ll have time for that. What about something at the gas station? More smokes? Porn mag?”

He frowned.

“Okay. Should I just grab another candy bar?”

A few minutes later, Tansy and his new friend were sitting at a picnic table in front of a long-vacant diner. Amongst the empty junk-food wrappers on the table sat a police scanner hooked up to a laptop.

“I guess you do know what you’re doing,” said the guy. “This looks pretty legit. How’d you learn all this stuff?”

“I dropped out of school,” Tansy said as he fiddled with the controls via his laptop, setting up a decryption generator that could crack into the right frequency. “How else would I find the time?”

“So, this is illegal, right?”

“Yeah,” said Tansy. “And you’re an accessory, so keep it on the hush.” He turned up the volume knob on the scanner until they could hear someone speaking. It sounded perfectly clear, a man’s voice describing a reconnaissance report. Something about three gunmen, with sniper rifles, on a rock ledge, on the north end of delta sector.

“Who is that?” asked the guy, his eyes widened. “The cops?”

“FBI. It’s their encrypted channel.”

They spent the next twenty minutes transfixed by the radio, listening intently to each transmission, after which they’d quietly go over what they’d just heard. It was mainly Tansy translating the military-ese for the news guy, summarizing the situation as a standoff between armed civilians and FBI tactical units. The gunmen, who were more often referred to as “suspects,” were on someone’s ranch, which was more often referred to as a “compound.” They were currently in hour thirteen of the standoff, with both sides holding firm. The compound’s occupiers refused to leave, or even lay down their arms, or allow the FBI access. And of course the FBI wasn’t going anywhere.

Most of the chatter was about the positioning of assets and snipers, the coordinating of times and plans. Occasionally they would talk of negotiations, relaying the comments and requests of the compound occupiers to and from central command. Still, the information was scant and heavily coded.

Although no one in the transmissions came out and said it, Tansy had a good idea who the FBI agents were after. It was the same group he’d been after himself: Nevada’s Sagebrush Militia. At one point they had been after Tansy, contacting him last week about a hacking job, offering a pretty penny for him to access a heavily fortified server. Something had seemed off, and so he’d brought the offer to the attention of DARC Ops. He and the team had only needed to look at it for just a few minutes before they decided they weren’t touching that deal with a fucking ten-foot pole.

The Sagebrush Militia members were not just a band of extremists. They were Nevada’s lunatic fringe. And they were well-armed, maybe even well-funded, considering the juicy fee they were willing to cough up to a hacker. If they ever were successful in finding a hacker, it was almost guaranteed that their scope was well beyond software pirating or stealing some intellectual rights from a startup in Silicon Valley. Considering their current real-life actions, which apparently called for FBI snipers, MRAPs, and highway blockades, whatever actions they’d wanted carried out online could not be good.

It was now Tansy’s job to make sure that never happened. The rest he’d let the FBI deal with.

“Hey, Jackson,” Tansy said in a phone call back at his car. “Do you know what our Sagebrush friends are up to today?”

“Yeah it’s all over the news,” said Jackson.

“What is?”

“I don’t know. Still trying to find out.”

That wasn’t a surprise. The whole nation would probably have been kept guessing into next week were it not for Tansy making a new friend in Parsnip, Nevada. “Well, you might find out sooner than later. I just gave some local news crew a little tip on decrypting FBI radio channels.”

“Tansy,” his boss said disapprovingly. “You were only supposed to give away free tips at DEFCON.”

That used to be the plan, anyway. Land in Vegas to finish some last obligations at DEFCON, and then head north to run a secret DARC Ops command center.

“How did that go, by the way?” asked Jackson.

“Fine. They almost completely fucked it up. But fine.”

“Are you ready to tell our boys how we can hack the new defense? Or have you not figured that out yet?”

He’d figured it out well enough. He worked most of it out, theoretically, on the plane to Vegas, before completing it in the few hours he’d had in his hotel room prior to the show. The only problem was that it was now the furthest thing from his mind.

“I’m still working on it.”

“Fine,” said Jackson. “I guess for now you should just work on getting to the command center.”

Jackson had been running things there for over a week, manning a team of hackers between meetings with local FBI agents. And although he was there with his newest employee, Mira, who also happened to be his new significant other, it was clear he was itching to get back to Washington.

“What’s the problem?” said Tansy. “You and Mira getting bored out there in the desert?”

“I convinced her that it would be like a vacation,” he said. “And then we got here.”

Tansy laughed. “And you expect me to be rushing to this place?”

“Well, it’s not a vacation for you. Where are you, by the way?”

“I don’t know. Turnip?”

“Turnip? What the hell is that? Are you far?”

Tansy looked down the street, watching his news friend carry the police scanner into the back of his Channel 7 van.

“Tansy, you need to get your ass over here so I can skip town. And so we can actually get some work done on this fucking militia. Do you have any leads on who they’re trying to recruit?”

“Not yet,” said Tansy. “But I have my suspicions. Put it this way—I’m probably gonna know the person.”

“Well? Have you talked to your friends?” Jackson was asking about the original members of Tansy’s hacking community. His only true friends, even though he hadn’t met most of them.

“I have,” said Tansy, lying again.

Tracking down any of the members was difficult enough, technically. But for one member in particular, the difficulty went far beyond any technology.