Carrie Butler continues to smile at Iris and turns away. She takes her husband’s arm, leading him away from those who are arguing with him. They start to work their way through the crowd.

Iris follows them.

31

Grant

Grant walks into the empty house; Mike is at the same neighborhood meeting that his mom is attending. There is food all over the kitchen table; people have brought pies, cookies, vegetable plates. He steals a cookie and eats it. Then he takes another cookie and goes upstairs to Peter’s room and knocks.

Peter looks exhausted, rubbing his eyes. He tries a smile at Grant when Grant hands him the cookie.

“Hey,” Grant says.

“Hey. You have an interesting problem.”

Grant’s heart sinks. “Is my laptop infected by this hacker?”

“Yes.”

“How?”

“Have you ever heard of the Shadow Brokers? Or WikiLeaks Vault 7?”

“Uh, no.”

“Those are two very famous releases of cyberwarfare tools, done by hackers. Shadow Brokers released some old NSA—National Security Agency—tools a while back. WikiLeaks Vault 7 release showed how the CIA uses tools to hack everything from web browsers to iPhones to Android phones.” Peter looks at his screen. “But before both of those, there was an earlier leak, about ten years ago, of a program called Dangerzone. It was a CIA hacker tool to remotely scan, download, and activate functions on a laptop. But the CIA said Dangerzone was never deployed. There were problems with it; it was easy to detect. It was a prototype. You understand?”

Grant nods, thinking: the CIA?

“There’s a hidden file on your system called Dangerzone. It looks like it’s been updated or modified and it’s been on your system for a while.”

“Spying on me.”

“Yes. It could have activated your laptop camera, so someone remotely could watch you through it. Or your microphone, so they could hear you. I don’t know if it could infect other systems. Probably it could hide on a flash drive and install itself on the next computer.”

“Why would the CIA want to spy on me?” His camera? His microphone? Has someone been seeing and hearing what all goes on in his room, his den, his kitchen, wherever he has the laptop? The thought is chilling, what a stranger could know about his family and what they’ve done and said.

“Well, I doubt it’s the CIA,” Peter says. “The program, although kind of a dud, was released by a hacker group. Someone took it and updated it and fixed it. What I don’t get is why not change the name? Why leave it ‘dangerzone’ when that’s likely on a list of released hacker tools a cybersecurity expert would know to look for?”

“How do I get it off?”

“I think we have to go to the police.”

“No, Peter, I can’t.”

“Grant.” Peter’s stare on him is no longer the disinterested gaze of the too-cool-for-school loner. “Have you been threatened?”