THE NIGHT OF THE RFIDS

by Edward M. Lerner

A powerful new ability brings powerful new temptations. To what extent should they be resisted?

My chief of staff stood stiffly, clutching a leather folder. The single sheet of paper inside awaited my signature. Barbara said nothing, knowing the depth of my resolve, but her body language spoke volumes. By any conventional logic this was no way to begin a term of office.

I never wanted to go into politics. Sometimes we sacrifice our dreams for a greater cause.

I’ve been hooked on history since the third grade, when I heard about the Lost Colony. Paying for four years of college so I could teach American history in high school was the limit of my ambition—and a daunting challenge. Sometimes events demand more of us than we dare ask of ourselves.

More than twenty years later, I remember those eventsas though they happened yesterday….

Sometime during the night the world had ended.

With no morning paper to confirm the obvious, my mother refused to believe. Instead, the lack of a Gazette had her full attention—that, and her inability to call anyone to complain. Dressed for work in her waitress uniform, she sat at our rickety dinette table, stymied in her morning ritual.

Our landline phone had no dial tone. The screen on my cell read: No service. Cable was out, too, and with it Internet access. At least the power remained on.

Well, Mom could complain to me, and did. I was of the wrong generation to understand getting news on dead trees; I couldn’t have sympathized under the best of circumstances. These were hardly the best of circumstances. And fussing at me did nothing to deliver a paper.

Mom’s coffee cup was nearly full. Filling a mug for myself and tasting it, I knew why. So much for the new coffeemaker she’d bought the day before. “Who knew Quick-E-Shoppe even sold them?” she’d said. “While I was getting gas, a promo came up on the pump display.”

Pouring the bitter sludge into the kitchen sink got me the “Timothy Alan Anderson, we don’t waste food in this household” lecture. Impulsive coffeepot buys apparently fell under different budgetary rules. I chalked up the all-three-names broadside to circumstances, still wondering just what those circumstances were.

I burrowed in my closet for rabbit ears and Mom in her closet for our disaster kit. She won. We listened to a scratchy AM radio station. “…Worst across the Carolinas and into southern Virginia. The extent of the outbreak remains…” The report dissolved into a staticky hiss. I cranked vigorously to recharge the radio. When I finished, the station had moved on to the weather.

“Outbreak?” Mom repeated. Her eyes darted to the open disaster kit on the kitchen counter. I was just barely old enough to remember when household disaster kits didn’t include plastic sheets and duct tape.

The dinette window was open, the gingham curtains billowing in the breeze. If a biological were loose nearby, we were toast. I must not have believed that, because thoughts of toast reminded me I had yet to eat breakfast. “Malware of some kind, I think. You know, like a computer virus. It could explain no cable or phone. I’ll bet that’s why there’s no morning paper. Computers set the type and run the presses.”

“That’s not so bad,” Mom decided. “If they fix it, I mean.”

For a while the room was silent but for the ticking of the kitschy wall clock, a black cat that waggled its eyes and wagged its tail in synch. More car horns than usual, somehow more impatient than usual, intruded. Computers down meant traffic lights out. The morning commute would be bad.

Commuting—and school—after the end of the world seemed so unfair.

“I’d better go, Tim. I’ll be late for work.” Mom sighed. She made no move for the door until I stood. I had morning classes, the first at eight. As for after school…

Damn the injustice, the obliteration of every computer on the planet would not close Seth’s Secondhand Books.

Theory had it that community college was preparing me for the university. According to plan, next year I’d put that theory to the test. That presumed I managed to set aside enough money for tuition. It was possible, I supposed. Mom and I might quit obsessing over daily meals.

I didn’t blame Seth Miller for paying me minimum wage. A used-book store is a calling, not a business model. Every book he sold was a victory over countless no-overhead competitors on eBay. Only that day no one in town could reach eBay. I remember hoping we might see two customers.

Truthfully, I didn’t understand how Seth afforded to pay me at all. I was too young, when he offered me a job in my sophomore year of high school, to imagine anyone lending a hand. Or to connect that offer with Dad’s recent death in Afghanistan.

Seth was nowhere in evidence when I got to the store. I was late, traffic lights having all defaulted to flashing red or yellow. Phone service remained out; there hadn’t been any way to say I’d be delayed.

“Hey, Marc,” I said. Marc Kimball was Seth’s other charity case. However lame I was, a college student (if just barely) stocking shelves with old graphic novels and recycled genre books—Marc was lamer. It never seemed to bother him.

Marc nodded and kept whistling. He couldn’t carry a tune in a bushel basket. Despite the John Deere cap and the hair curling up at his collar, I had my doubts he would recognize a bushel basket. He was about twenty-five, and—obvious when he felt talkative—a city boy.

Seth paid Marc off the books, no pun intended, something I wasn’t supposed to have noticed. I guessed that explained why Marc worked here. He had appeared about four months earlier. When I asked, making conversation, “So where are you from?” Marc’s answer was, “Around.” He was amiable enough, just private. Besides working at the bookstore he did freelance computer repair. Those were cash transactions, too.

Between customers, which was most of the time, we talked about movies and music and books. Marc spoke fast and flat like my cousins in inside-the-Beltway northern Virginia, for all intents and purposes a Yank. In rural South Carolina that made him a foreigner. The little old ladies who ran the tiny museum for our local Civil War skirmish site—battlefield was far too grandiose a term—still turned away vehicles with northern license plates, smiling sweetly as they claimed their parking lot was full: one more states’ right. Within the museum, the late conflict between the states bore no aspect of civility and was labeled the War of Northern Aggression.

Still, I doubted even the Charleston office of Homeland Security considered Yanks illegal aliens. As harmless as Marc Kimball seemed, he was wanted for something, or guilty of something, if only tax evasion. That he was a movie buff was one of the few things Marc freely revealed. So maybe he knew this old movie, too….

The Fugitive was based on a TV series from well before my time. Movie and show alike were about a man on the lam, escaped from prison, desperate to prove his innocence. The hero’s name was Dr. Richard Kimball. So was Kimball a too-cute alias or merely a coincidence? I’d never had the nerve to ask.

UPS had delivered a stack of boxes. I sighed, knowing the massive sorting task that lay ahead. Seth purchased whole libraries from estate sales, sight unseen, for pennies a book. At that price we usually overpaid. Still, we’d occasionally come across a gem, say, a rare first edition, worth more than the store grossed in a month.

“You’re quiet today, Tim,” Marc said suddenly. He was in the mystery section, shelving paperbacks with enthusiastic taps on their spines and a certain je ne sais quoi—only in hindsight, I can say quoi: scarcely contained exhilaration.

“Nothing works today!” I snapped. My cell phone was an inert lump in my jeans pocket. A day without texting was … unnatural. “Why are you in such a good mood?”

A shrug: It doesn’t affect me. “What have you heard about the outages?”

My psych prof commuted from Athens, Georgia, outside the dead zone. She’d listened to radio news for most of her inbound drive, and the class had peppered her with questions. I summarized. “A really nasty virus on the loose. Destructive. Best guess is it’s been dormant, below the radar, for months. Today it’s popped up everywhere, especially widespread in the Carolinas. We’re back in the Dark Ages.”

Gesturing at the shelves, Marc laughed. “Not quite. We have plenty of books.”

Then Seth came through the door, huffing a bit. He was middle aged and heavyset, and the day was hot. “Be of good cheer, gentlemen. Stuff is coming back up. The Exxon station can pump gas again. You just need to pay with cash.”

Gas pumps, if only standalone. The traffic light outside the store had stopped flashing and now showed green. Maybe the world hadn’t ended, merely been struck stupid. Why was my friend and coworker so indifferent? “A return to normal would be a good thing, Marc.”

Marc shrugged again and returned to shelving mysteries.

A newspaper came the next morning. The virus taunted us from every front-page story.

While Mom read, grimacing at her coffee, I channel surfed. Cable was back—and it wasn’t only basic. Suddenly, we had premium service. Everyone had premium service. Yesterday’s malware attack had trashed the cable company’s customer records. I would enjoy the free HBO while it lasted. Internet access remained out.

It wasn’t just the cable company. Customer records all over had been scrambled. Like cable channels, things that could be offered to everyone came quickly back online. But credit cards, toll-road transponders, pagers—services involving individual accounts … those were hobbled or remained offline. In the CNN screen crawler an endless line of companies forecast their returns to service. I began to have hope when my cell came to life, limited to local calling.

With one foot out the door, an alert on the local-access channel stopped me in my tracks. The Feds had declared the outages a terrorist incident. The National Guard had been called up to seal the area.

Hadley Township sat near the southern end of the quarantine zone. Outside the bookstore, Humvees rumbled up and down the street. Choppers flew over a couple times.

Marc wasn’t around despite what the posted work schedule indicated. I asked Seth about that, and he shrugged.

Another Humvee rolled past the store. “This makes no sense,” I said. “How will soldiers catch a hacker?”

“No,” Seth answered. “It makes perfect sense—from their point of view.”

Their. For a mere syllable, it carried a lot of feeling. I remember staring.

Seth said, “The National Guard can’t be after the hacker, though I wouldn’t doubt there’s a promotion in it for anyone who somehow stumbles across him … or her. I’m guessing the Guard is here to keep everyone in.”

I noticed the hesitation before “or her,” but chalked it up to the odds. Most hackers were male. I had a more basic question. “Keep everyone in? Why? We haven’t done anything.”

The bookstore subscribed to the morning paper, another facet of Seth’s fierce loyalty to the printed word. Still, I don’t think I’d ever seen him use it for anything but packing material.

Today Seth was glued to the Gazette. He tapped an article syndicated from the Associated Press. “Have you seen how the bug spread? Through point-of-sale systems. Not just any POS system. Ones that work with toll-road transponders. Electronic key fobs. No-swipe credit cards.”

Antiquarian leanings are only to be expected in the owner of a used-book store. Compared to Seth, my mother was a high-tech wizard. A cell phone was nothing short of miraculous to the boss. Why the sudden interest?

“Mr. Seth Miller? My name is Jones. I’m a federal agent.”

A stranger stood in the open door, wearing a black suit despite the summer heat. He flipped open a leather badge wallet; Seth (and I, discreetly, from a distance—I had good eyes back then) dutifully examined it. Homeland Security Bureau, HSB, what the wags called Homeland BS.

A Fed in the flesh didn’t make me feel waggish.

“Can I see a warrant?” Seth asked.

Agent Jones smiled humorlessly. “No need. Just tell me if you’ve seen someone.”

Seth stiffened. “Who?”

Jones offered a folded sheet of paper. The fold covered everything but the headshot of a young man in dress shirt and tie.

Could that be Marc in the photo? I tried to picture my friend with a trim mustache and short hair, without glasses or the John Deere cap.

“Don’t know him,” Seth said.

Jones didn’t ask me. I looked young for my age and happened to be holding a graphic novel. He probably mistook me for a customer.

The grainy image Jones next offered Seth was probably from a security camera. I recognized the Hadley Exxon. And the man at the air pump in that photo, inflating the front tire of his bike? It was Marc, no question.

“That’s the same guy?” Seth asked. “Sure, I know him. That’s Marc Kimball.”

“An employee of yours, I’m told,” Jones prompted.

“Not really. He’s done odd jobs for me.”

My head was spinning, the least reason for which was Seth’s dissembling. I supposed he lied to avoid trouble about failing to report wages. What could the Feds want with Marc?

Jones took back the photo. “I’d like to speak with him.”

“Shouldn’t you be doing something about the outage?” I blurted. I couldn’t help myself.

Jones silenced me with a hard stare, then turned back to Seth. “Mr. Miller, do you know where I might find Kimball?”

Seth shook his head. “Sorry. What’s he done, anyway?”

“I’d like to speak with him,” Jones repeated, handing Seth an embossed business card. “If you see or hear from Kimball, let me know.”

What could Marc have done to merit the Feds’ attention amid this chaos?

Hadley’s lone Internet café was across the business district. That made it a short walk away. They got Internet service by satellite, not cable, so I headed over on the hope they had connectivity.

They did. I clicked the Ten Most Wanted Fugitives link on the Homeland BS website. From the middle of the list Marc’s picture stared back at me.

I had one answer, at least. Kimball was an alias.

Every couple of weeks, Marc and I went stargazing in the county forest preserve in the hills west of town. In hindsight, I didn’t know how often he went. There were always six-packs hidden in the stream, nicely chilled, anchored by water-smoothed rocks. I was sufficiently enamored with access to his beer stash, me being still a few months under age and Mom being strict about such things, that I didn’t wonder what else Marc kept in the woods.

We’d head out right after dinner, the going being easier before sundown. We’d shoot the breeze while we waited for dark. Thinking back, it’s clear Marc steered the conversation away from himself. That didn’t take great conversational skills—I was pretty shallow back then.

Sometimes we’d kick around the same topics as at work. Discussing books and movies and music unavoidably touches on politics. Benjamin Disraeli once said, “A man who is not a Liberal at sixteen has no heart; a man who is not a Conservative at sixty has no head.” I was a lot closer to sixteen than sixty, and not shy with my opinion that the country was going to hell in a hand basket. It’s easy to pontificate when you have no interest in getting involved.

Marc kept his own counsel. I chose to read into his silence that he also had misgivings.

But mostly we spoke of dreams. Mine involved making a difference—”Those who do not learn from history,” et cetera—by shaping young minds. If Marc saw irony, given my callow youth, he kept it to himself.

His dreams involved space. Once darkness fell, he would point out the International Space Station streaking across the sky, or the Apollo landing sites, or whatever planets were in view. He would talk about the robots creeping across Mars, about the spacecraft exploring the outer planets, and about all we might learn by dispatching robots to Europa and Enceladus.

Even history majors had heard of Europa, if only that it was one of the moons of Jupiter discovered by Galileo. Enceladus was new to me. I learned it was a frozen moon, perhaps with a liquid water ocean beneath its icy surface, perhaps with life within its oceans, orbiting distant ringed Saturn.

Beneath twinkling stars Marc spoke with a wistfulness I didn’t understand. Surely someone with Marc’s computer skills could find employment closer to the space program than Seth’s Secondhand Books. NASA Huntsville was an easy day’s drive from here. He deflected my questions with self-deprecating remarks until even I gathered he was changing the subject.

Marc being on the lam would explain a lot.

I tried to imagine my friend as somehow the cause of this madness. Why would he do such a thing? On the most-wanted list, the name beneath Marc’s picture was Zachary Boyer. Googling that name only confused me further.

What master terrorist keeps a blog?

Sipping overpriced coffee, I skimmed screen after screen of blog entries. My mind’s tongue kept tripping over the acronym RFID until I began treating it as a word: are-fid. Radio-frequency identification.

I knew little more about RFIDs than what the plain words behind the acronym suggested, but Marc/Zachary went on and on about them. Jamming them. Spoofing them. Removing them. Comments and linksback to his blog postings suggested he had a large following.

Oh yes: The blog freely offered that Homeland Security was after him.

I had done nothing wrong, but guilt came easily. I could have told Agent Jones I knew Marc Kimball. Hell, I knew where Marc lived. So why had I said nothing? Following Seth’s lead, in part. Maybe a little of my inaction stemmed from an irrelevant memory: In The Fugitive, Richard Kimball was innocent.

I knew so much more now.

The virus wreaking havoc had lain dormant for months, and the Carolinas were the epicenter of this attack. Marc had appeared here in Hadley, South Carolina, a few months ago. Marc knew computers—and his fugitive alter ego was wanted for cyberterrorism.

And still I dithered.

Maybe I just couldn’t believe Marc was the criminal type. I sure as hell didn’t see him as a terrorist, cyber— or otherwise.

No one in the café paid me any attention, my silent surfing no competition for the argument that raged at the counter. Despite myself, I couldn’t tune it out. I listened in growing dismay.

The National Guard wasn’t merely stopping people at the nearby state border. You couldn’t cross, no matter how upstanding a citizen you were, without a government-issued photo ID and an up-close and personal scan of yourself and your vehicle. Many people refused.

RFIDs? From Zachary’s blog, the tags were hidden in clothing labels, toll-road transponders,car tires…. RFIDs felt like part of the puzzle, but there had to be more.

My booth gave me a view of the street outside the café. Across the road Jones stood speaking with two elderly passersby. Looking uneasy, they studied a paper in Jones’ hand, presumably with Marc’s picture. It was only a matter of time until Jones found someone who would point him toward Marc. Zachary.

I had to know how Marc was involved.

I cleared the web browser’s history file, cookies, and cache before slipping out the café’s back door.

The Southern Hospitality Inne was old and rundown, with a Bates Motel feel about it. The locals mostly referred to the place as the Southern Comfort, after a weakness of the owner. It was Hadley’s lodging of last resort, where half vacant meant booming business.

That day, the Southern Hospitality’s parking lot was oddly full. Most of the cars bore out-of-state plates. People milled around in the lot, and the motel’s tiny office was jammed.

I ambled past, catching snippets of conversation. The Guard had turned these people back at the highway out of town. There was more talk about scanning as a condition of passage.

Some of the strangers were mad as hell. More were scared. No one admitted to having seen it, but several claimed to have talked to someone who knew someone who had heard from someone else…

Could the Guard be shooting people for trying to sneak past a roadblock? That was insane and yet somehow eerily believable. “Enemy combatant” was all too elastic a term. Call someone an enemy combatant and due process went out the window.

(Rumors of border shootings persist to this day, ever unconfirmed. I can finally find out the truth. It’s a scary prospect.)

I studied the map tacked to the town Welcome sign, on the state highway just past the motel. National Guard checkpoints were prominently marked. Leaving my car in town had been a good decision. I figured a route around them and kept walking.

An hour later I knelt by a familiar stream, fishing in the cool waters for a brew.

“I could use another,” Marc called. He perched on a boulder beside the mouth of a small cave. From where he sat you could see half the sprawling forest preserve by day and half the starry sky by night. I wondered if we’d ever stargaze here again.

We clinked cans, drinking in companionable silence until the words burst out of me. “Are you him? Did you do it?”

He thrust out his hand. “Zachary Boyer. Zach to my friends.”

“I wasn’t followed,” I said. I was mad at him for past deception, and mad at myself for ignoring the implied question.

Of course he was my friend. He was practically the brother I’d never had. I had shared my hopes and dreams with him. I was young and self-absorbed enough to believe that entitled me to know everything, as though my banal ambitions merited him putting his liberty at risk.

He didn’t sense my turmoil, or he chose to overlook it. “Good to know. Yes, I wrote a virus. I set it loose. You’ve seen sales terminals that read credit cards without swiping? The virus spreads wirelessly through them.” He paused for a long swig. “I can’t help noticing you didn’t ask me why.”

Yet I had to know that. Why else had I come? “Cyberterrorism is a far cry from robot explorers on Europa.”

Zach winced. “Priorities.”

“You’ll have to do better than that,” I said.

“You’re better off walking away.”

I stayed put and Zach sighed. “If you want to know, I’ll tell you. Excuse me for packing at the same time.”

“RFIDs,” I guessed.

“RFIDs.” Zach stood and I followed him several paces into the cave. With a grunt, he shoved aside a massive slab of stone. A food stash had been hidden behind it, everything dehydrated or freeze-fried. A wad of old bills nestled among the sealed packets. “I didn’t truly expect to have to hike out. I never imagined the quarantine would be established this fast.”

He loaded a scuffed leather backpack as he spoke, methodically selecting packages and wedging them into place. “Anyway, about RFIDs. They’re tiny silicon chips embedded in credit cards, shoes, tires, E-ZPass transponders, you name it. Cash, even, in recent bills. If it’s new, it’s chipped.”

“For faster checkout?” I guessed. “Counting cash in the drawer?”

“And taking inventory with a quick radio ping. And access-control cards. Lots of reasons.” He kept cramming in supplies. “Anywhere the chips go—the Feds know.”

But he had gone undetected for months. I said, “Not everywhere, obviously.”

“As it happens, Tim, I’m an electrical engineer. I’m pretty good at finding and disabling the damn things.” He winked, and for a moment he seemed like … Marc.

As quickly, the moment passed. I said, “Then how did they track you to Hadley?”

He shrugged. “I’m hardly a criminal mastermind. I really don’t know how. I’m surprised it took this long.”

In the distance a train whistle blew, low and plaintive. I still didn’t understand. “So, RFIDs. How do they work?”

“As feats of engineering, they’re actually quite elegant. Just a little silicon chip and an antenna. Mostly they don’t carry an onboard power source. Batteries would make the tags too bulky and expensive for widespread use. The chip holds part numbers and serial numbers. For more sophisticated applications, the chip might do a bit of computing, too.”

“Back up a bit,” I said. “No battery?”

“RFID readers emit low-power radio signals. Your typical RFID tag extracts enough energy from a query signal to wake up, decide whether to answer, and modulate the weak reflected signal into a response. Passive tags like that are dirt cheap; readers are expensive.”

That was neat. “So what’s the catch?”

“Chains and franchises. They have corporate headquarters eager to suck every scrap of information into big, juicy databases. Those databases … Homeland BS covets them.”

Businesses didn’t come much smaller than in Hadley. We didn’t have a lot of chain stores. Maybe that explained Zach hiding here. But no, he said he could find and disable the tags.

So: What about RFIDs? Subpoenaed or hacked, coerced or freely provided—federal access to the databases seemed entirely too plausible. And yet…

“You hear that?” Zach paused in his packing.

I shook my head.

He swept the landscape with a small telescope. “It’s okay. Just Seth.”

Seth came here, too? Once again, in my youthful self-importance, I felt disappointment.

Soon we heard Seth’s shuffling, huffing approach. The short but steep climb up to the cave left him panting. He did a double take at finding me inside. “Hi, Tim.” Seth pulled a wad of crumpled bills from his chinos pocket. “From petty cash. All old bills without chips. Best I could do on short notice.”

Seth was in Zach’s confidence! His hinting about RFIDs at the bookstore suddenly made sense. I felt more deflated than ever. “Why, Marc? I mean, Zach. What’s this really about?”

Zach leaned against the cave wall. “It’s about the NARCC.”

Junior year in high school, my World Civ class had a unit on dystopias. Animal Farm. Brave New World. 1984. Scary stuff, but relics of a bygone era. 1984 had come and gone before I was born.

That day in the cave I learned how nalve I’d been. Big Brother was alive and well, only his true name was NARCC.

The National RFID Consolidation Center.

In my defense, who knew back then? Not Congress: Except for the intelligence oversight committees, Congress was in the dark. Not the press or the civil liberties groups. Not the companies strongarmed into providing daily feeds from their corporate databases.

The more intrusive the program, the closer to the vest Homeland BS held it. A secret data warehouse of most RFID readouts nationwide? It provided a window onto the lives of damn near everyone. That was the closest held program of all.

Zach had heard rumors about the NARCC as a computer consultant at Homeland BS—a discovery that helped send him underground. No wonder Homeland BS was so eager to bring him in.

No wonder the Feds were so diligent about suppressing his web presence.

They didn’t succeed, of course. The blog I’d skimmed was hosted on an offshore website. And yet the blog, for all its anti-RFID fervor, never mentioned the NARCC. To avoid drawing attention to Zach’s ultimate target?

My mind reeled. RFID tags in my clothes and sneakers, even the money in my wallet, shouting my presence to every store I walked past. RFID tags in the tires of my car, potentially read and recorded at every gas pump and toll plaza I passed, even when I paid with cash. Not very often in Hadley, to be sure, but unavoidably in any big city across the land.

But it wasn’t only me; it was three hundred million or so of my fellow citizens. Never mind unreasonable search and seizure. I was a wannabe history major; I couldn’t imagine how anyone might handle so much data.

Only when I asked, Zach made it sound simple: divide and conquer. Even my ancient iPod had an eighty-gigabyte hard drive, and Apple kept selling iPods by the millions. Parts Apple bought, the Feds could, too. Storing vast amounts of RFID data seemed practical enough. But finding anything within it?

“It’s no big deal with a parallel supercomputer,” Zach said. “The data streams start out time sequenced, organized by the location where the tags were read. Companies would have to go out of their way to lose that presort. Correlating data across different sources isn’t that big a deal either. Credit-rating agencies do it all the time with consumer records.”

I was in near shock, but none of this seemed to surprise Seth. He and Zach were kindred spirits despite Seth’s technophobia—or in an odd way, perhaps because of it. It wasn’t especially warm today, but Seth was sweating. He wiped his forehead with his forearm.

“And the NARCC is nearby?” I guessed.

“NARCC is a distributed system.” Zach paused to knock back the last of his beer. “The primary regional center for the Carolinas is in Charleston. Its backup site is in Charlotte.”

Both cities were within the quarantine zone. That couldn’t be coincidence. But why this region?

Seth wiped his forehead again. “You guys have more beer?”

“Coming up,” I said, turning toward the cave mouth. There was motion in the bushes about fifty yards beyond the stream where the beers chilled. “Zach, it’s probably nothing but…”

Zach looked where I pointed. “Seth, could anyone have followed you?”

Seth frowned. “Honest, I was careful. I saw a late-model domestic sedan parked up the street from your apartment building. Among all the pickups, it stuck out like a sore thumb. I assumed Jones and his Homeland BS friends were looking for you, so I kept going.”

“We’re in trouble, guys,” Zach said. “Seth, if you spotted a stakeout, the chances are someone spotted you.” And followed Seth here, logic continued.

I had done nothing wrong, and yet I was terrified. The NARCC was apparently a deep, dark secret. What happened once Homeland BS reasoned I knew what Marc knew?

I pulled the little telescope from an outside pocket of Zach’s knapsack. “There’s definitely someone behind those bushes.”

I’d once imagined Zach had been drawn to this spot by the vista. I changed my mind when he revealed the food cache. There was another way out of this cave, and it emptied into rough terrain that extended up past the Tennessee border. Eric Robert Rudolph, the extremist behind the Atlanta Olympics bombing and several more besides, had gone to ground in Appalachian terrain like this—then avoided capture for five years.

I picked up Zach’s backpack. “Time to go. Now.”

He pushed past me, ignoring the pack. I turned to see what was so urgent.

Seth had slumped onto the cave floor.

Seth’s skin was clammy, his breathing shallow and labored. “Heart attack, I think,” Zach said. He rolled Seth onto his back and began CPR.

“Get going,” I said, although my own heart was pounding. “I’ll look after Seth.”

“Do you know CPR?”

I didn’t. “Show me.”

“Not the time for on-the-job training, Tim. I’m staying.” Zach did chest compressions as he spoke. “Do you have cell reception?”

I checked. “No.”

“If it’s Seth the Feds followed, they may not know you’re here.” A pause for mouth-to-mouth. “Tim, your fingerprints are all over the beer cans. Wipe them off and go. In thirty seconds, I’m shouting for help. Maybe whoever’s watching can radio for a medevac chopper.”

I went.

I was scarcely out the cave’s back entrance when I heard the thp-thp-thp of a distant helicopter. I stayed under the leafy canopy as best I could, planning to approach town far from the forest preserve’s main entrance.

My mind and stomach churned. So I happened to know a criminal. I hadn’t even lied to Jones, since he hadn’t deigned to question me. Why should I feel guilty?

The better question was: Why shouldn’t I?

I had abandoned a friend. I’d even been too self-absorbed to say he still was my friend, shame I would carry with me as long as I lived. My ignorance of CPR doomed Zach to capture.

But more than guilt and shame and fear for Seth roiled my thoughts. Zach’s excuse, or explanation, or rationalization—I hadn’t decided which—had been interrupted by Seth’s arrival. Zach had admitted to setting loose the computer virus. That was unambiguously a crime.

Yet somehow it was all about the NARCC. And not just any NARCC, but the Charleston regional center.

I plodded through the woods, circling town, the deepening gloom an apt metaphor for my thoughts.

Walking up Main Street, there was no mistaking the town’s ugly mood. Some people were worried. Some were scared. Everyone was angry—not at a computer virus, or the hacker behind it, but at the Feds.

There was an army base near town, and the army brats all went to Hadley schools. I was an army brat, too; I used the term affectionately, but one of my “peers” had mostly grown up in New England. We called Kelly our foreign-exchange student. She dropped her R’s, thought grits were disgusting, and said of the Civil War, “Get over it.”

Kelly’s family was long gone, but I found myself wondering what she’d have said about current events. In the Palmetto State, we took states’ rights seriously. Still. Washington calling up and federalizing our National Guard to keep us from traveling … that wasn’t going down well.

Mayor Jackson was manning the figurative barricades. His great-great— (I forget how many greats) grandfather was Stonewall Jackson—something the mayor would let no one forget. “We will not surrender our freedoms,” he thundered as I approached the courthouse.

I slogged past, my circuitous hike the least cause of my exhaustion. By now Marc/Zach was in federal custody and Seth was…

I hurried to Hadley’s only hospital, hoping that Seth was still alive.

The volunteer at the reception desk sent me upstairs to the cardiac care unit. “Hey, Clay,” I greeted the policeman standing guard in the hall. We’d known each other since the fourth grade. Clay looked as unhappy to be there as I to find him.

Seth spotted me through the open doorway. “Come in, son,” he called. His voice was encouragingly firm. He had cranked the bed into a sitting position. The plastic tube under his nose was connected by a coil of tubing to a wall-mounted nozzle. Oxygen, I guessed.

Monitors crowded the room. Something beeped softly. All my medical training came from ER reruns, but the slow and steady rhythm reassured me. “How are you feeling, Seth?”

“Not bad. Well enough to be impressed by the speed of the grapevine.”

That grapevine remark had to be for Clay’s benefit, lest he be reporting back to Homeland BS. I took my cue. “Yeah, someone in the Square mentioned it. I came as soon as I heard.”

“Not surprising. I made a dramatic entrance.” Seth coughed, and something gurgled in his lungs. “Medevac chopper.”

He had the energy and presence of mind to coach the potential witness; he couldn’t be too ill. Hell, he was exhibiting more presence of mind than me, rushing in here without an explanation prepared. He had made no mention of Marc/Zach, and I took that hint, too. It had finally occurred to me why Zach had been waiting by the cave. Not for me, and not for dark, but for Seth to arrive with that extra money. Getaway money. That might make Seth an accessory of some sort.

“What are you in for, Seth?” I asked.

“Respiratory arrest. It could have been a lot worse.” He managed a weak smile.

Drawing again on my ER training, I took that to mean the chopper got him here before lung failure brought on cardiac arrest. “I should let you rest. I’ll drop by tomorrow.”

“Hold the fort for me, Tim?”

He’d asked me dozens of times to mind the store. “Of course.”

“Sorry about this,” Clay said softly as I exited the CCU. “Not my idea, Tim. The Feds want him watched.”

Nothing said about watching me. It appeared I was home free. Somehow that troubled me, as though I were sitting out a fight I belonged in. “The Feds interested in Seth? Did they say why?”

“For now, he’s a material witness. It turns out Homeland BS really wanted your buddy Marc, only that’s not his real name.”

“Wanted?” I repeated.

Clay nodded. “They have Marc in custody. Choppered him out already.”

I returned the way I had come, down Main Street to Town Square. The crowd, if anything, had grown. Mayor Jackson had ceded his spot at the center of the courthouse porch to a tall woman I didn’t know. Her Charlotte 49ers baseball cap suggested an out-of-towner.

Mom caught my eye from across the square, and I made my way over. “What’s going on?” I asked.

“Venting,” she said, as though that explained everything.

And maybe it did.

“…Not just people, either. Whatever you had in your vehicle—luggage, parcels, you name it—they scanned that, too!” 49er fan was red in the face. “Refuse and they turned you back.”

Apparently she had refused.

“They?” I whispered.

Mom tipped her head in answer, toward where a thoroughly unhappy-looking squad of soldiers stood watching. National Guard, presumably, but not from the local company, or I would have recognized some faces.

A balding guy, another stranger, replaced the 49ers fan. Mrs. Nguyen, the town postmaster, replaced him. A burly man in a tight and faded U2 T-shirt went after her. Half the people in the square had a story to tell, and I lost track. Tourists. Business travelers. Folks wanting only to visit out-of-town relatives. Some people must have submitted to scanning and been allowed to pass, but they weren’t here to present another viewpoint.

The watching guardsmen said nothing.

I multitasked, half processing the repetitious narratives, still groping for an explanation. Zach’s cause was RFID abuse. The scanning everyone complained about? It surely involved the RFID tags embedded in their cars and possessions. That wasn’t only my guess; several angry orators thought as much. But why?

My stomach rumbled, and Mom glanced my way. It occurred to me that I hadn’t had anything to eat since an early lunch. “I’m fine,” I told her.

You know how people behind the counter at fast food places always ask, “You want fries with that?” Some of my friends worked fast food. No one expects any initiative from counter jockeys; the point-of-sale terminals prompted them.

It wasn’t a big leap to imagine tie-in selling taken to the next level. A department store that polled the RFID tags in your clothing, so the most colorblind salesperson can recommend ties to match the shirt you’re buying. Walk past the same store a year later wearing that same shirt and get texted with a coupon for a newer style. Get a fill-up and the gas pump displays an offer to replace your old tires, or—mystery solved—offers a coffeepot if there’s a can of coffee in your car. Run a string of errands, toting your purchases from store and store, and—

I shivered. Anything became possible. Two days ago I’d thought web ads targeted to my surfing were intrusive and creepy. Of course some businesses allowed their RFID readers to scan for more than just what they sold. And once they had information…

Zach hadn’t explained everything to me—he hadn’t had time—but it seemed like his virus was meant to infiltrate the NARCC.

My thoughts churned. The NARCC. RFID consolidation. A virus dormant for months. Scanning everyone’s RFID-tagged possessions. The NARCC. Hold the fort.

Hold the fort!

“Have you ever been to Fort Sumter?” I asked abruptly.

Barbara looked mildly embarrassed. In her nasal Midwestern twang, she said, “Maybe it balances things that I haven’t visited Appomattox, either.”

I had to smile. “Fort Sumter is a main tourist destination in Charleston. The old fortification occupies a manmade island smack in the center of the harbor mouth, from which its cannons once controlled all sea access to the port. Take a National Park Service tour boat—that’s the only way out to the island. The ranger will explain that the fort was built as a consequence of the War of 1812. She’ll tell you construction began in 1829. Then she’ll skip to 1861, Confederate bombardment of the fort, and the start of the Civil War. The curious lack of urgency after the War of 1812 will go unmentioned—

“Like the first time South Carolina seriously tried to secede.”

“The first time?” Barbara echoed.

The repressed history teacher in me never required much encouragement. “The true legacy of the War of 1812 was war debt and higher tariffs. The tariffs kept climbing, kept playing regional favorites, until things came to a boil with the Tariff Act of 1828. That act quickly became known in South Carolina as the Tariff of Abominations.

“In 1829, the federal government suddenly began shipping what was ultimately seventy thousand tons of New England rock to build up a sandbar at the mouth of Charleston harbor.

“The South Carolina legislature eventually empowered a convention that declared the Tariff of Abominations null within the state. Both sides prepared for conflict. The national constitutional crisis stretched on, the hated tariff forcefully defended by that other Jackson, Andrew. Finally, in 1833, tariffs were substantially reduced but the state’s right of nullification was effectively repudiated.

“And construction of Fort Sumter continued….”

Hold the fort.

I took the broad, flat courthouse steps three at a time. Mayor Jackson blinked—I had never been one to make waves—but ceded the bullhorn when I reached for it.

Why had Zach come here? For Seth’s help, I’d thought at first. Perhaps, but not just that. Even the cursory look I’d taken at Zach’s blog—so much had happened since, it seemed impossible that had been only a few hours earlier!—revealed hundreds of supporters. They must be scattered across the country.

Because of the NARCC down the road in Charleston? Zach had said it was a regional center. Why target it and not another of the regional centers?

Simply because if Zach hadn’t come here, I wouldn’t be asking these questions? Too pat.

Hold the fort. Seth always said that before leaving me in charge at the bookstore. He meant nothing special by it—but the phrase had evoked something in me.

I gazed out over the crowd, my mouth gone dry. “Friends.” The word came out a croak. A few in the square chuckled—not the reaction I was going for. Mom looked confused, and I couldn’t blame her. At parties, I usually gravitated to a quiet corner.

I didn’t know what to say, only that things needed to be said.

I lowered the bullhorn, cleared my throat, and tried again. “Friends.” This time my voice boomed across the square. Again, still louder, “Friends!” The crowd quieted. “I’d like to explain what’s going on.”

The words tumbled out of me, surmises become certainty. To this day, I can’t fully reconstruct the speech that propelled me into public life. But I understand why Zach chose a small town in South Carolina. The virus he planted would have fared equally well against any of the regional NARCC centers. What made here special was history. Was who we are.

“Why quarantine us? It starts with the RFID tags in much of what we own. The tags are put there for mundane purposes like taking inventory. The same tags let Homeland BS monitor where you go as easily as you surf to find what’s playing at the Cineplex.

“But the Feds aren’t watching me. That’s what you’re telling yourself. You’re probably right—till you happen to pass, or be a friend of a friend of someone in whom they have curiosity. Until you check out a library book that doesn’t pass official muster. Until someone just gets curious, or mistakes you for a ‘person of interest.’

“Think you can buck the system by shopping with cash instead of credit cards? Withdraw cash from your bank, and the tags embedded in the currency are associated with you. What you buy with cash at most stores”—but not Seth’s Secondhand Books, where the cash register was a cigar box—”gets associated with you. After that, the tires on your car and the shirt on your back announce you to every RFID reader you pass.”

People had been angry and confused. Now comprehension replaced confusion. Their expressions grew ever grimmer.

I kept going. “How does one more computer virus enter into this? Here’s what I think.

“This virus must have scrambled RFID tracking databases in”—I almost said Charleston and Charlotte, which would have revealed knowledge best kept to myself—”that is, that cover the Carolinas. How can the Feds spy on us now? Sure, RFID readers will still see tagged items go past—only that data is useless unless they know who owns that shirt or those truck tires.

“So that’s why the quarantine. If you were allowed”—I made air quotes—”allowed to go to Atlanta or New Orleans or Chicago, the Feds couldn’t later retrieve and second-guess your every step. That’s what Homeland BS wants to prevent.

“Soon enough, attention will turn from the people caught on the road, from scanning whatever few things the travelers in the crowd happened to buy on their trips. My friends, the Feds will want to recreate a full database for each of us. Every RFID tag, in everything we own.”

“They have no right!” shouted someone in the square.

“Where I go, what I buy—that’s my business,” another yelled.

So were most things any of us did. That didn’t stop the government from taking an interest. I said, “Maybe they’ll bring up the Patriot Act. Maybe they’ll talk about ‘regulating interstate commerce.’ Mark my words, though: They will demand entry to every house and business, to scan everything we own, before letting us travel again.”

“The hell they will!” This from tiny Mrs. Nguyen, who never uttered a cross word.

Those databases are abominations, I thought. And: Hold the fort. I raised my arms above my head until the crowd quieted. “Then we all refuse to be rescanned.”

Mayor Jackson, still at my side, coughed. “Then what? Hadley becomes a commune, cut off from the rest of the country?”

“Not we, Hadley,” I answered. “We, South Carolina. North Carolina, too, if they’ll join us.”

And so began the Third Secession.

“Mr. President?” The hand clasping the leather folder had returned to Barbara’s side. She had the aura of one hoping for a reprieve.

“I was reminiscing,” I said, “not having second thoughts. I’ll take the letter now.”

Reluctantly, she set the folder on my desk.

I wasn’t quite done reminiscing. “It was a long road from the steps of the Hadley courthouse, to addressing the legislature in Columbia, to the state convention empanelled in Charleston. I was surprised to be named a delegate to that convention.”

She managed a grin. “Then only you were surprised.”

“I remember long walks along the Battery, the promenade on the harbor’s edge by the grand old mansions.” The Battery was where Charleston’s citizens gathered on April 12, 1861 to cheer on the bombardment of Fort Sumter. “I remember the long weeks of debate whether to surrender our principles for the benefits of travel and trade.”

And while we talked, the factory in Spartanburg that had until recently produced RFIDs found a better market. Soon they were running 24/7. Everyone wanted personal RFID locators and battery-powered jammers.

Untraceable, South Carolinians were quarantined—blockaded—in the name of national security. For our part, we welcomed anyone, from any state, who wanted freedom. Even Yanks.

Print, broadcast, web … every kind of reporter wanted to cover our deliberations. Countless people observed by webcam. “It was an amazing time, Barbara. The longer we debated, the more people across the other states began to ask why they should live beneath the federal microscope.”

The ACLU and half a dozen privacy groups jumped on the bandwagon. Websites popped up listing products with embedded RFIDs—and more and more consumers boycotted anything that did. The Electronic Freedom Foundation championed a ban on RFID tags in all goods to be sold at retail.

Flinty old Senator Peterson of Vermont was the first to call on Congress to defund the NARCC, even before we in Charleston quite got around to our vote.

So it never quite came to secession, because everyone began flocking to us.

I unclipped the pen from my shirt pocket. I needed no one’s permission, but I did want understanding. Barbara and I had worked together since my first congressional campaign.

“I respect your arguments, Barbara. I have considered them. Yes, Zach disclosed classified information. Yes, malicious data destruction was and remains a felony. Yes, disabling the Charleston NARCC doubtless hampered ongoing investigations. And yes, yes, yes—ends cannot justify means, or we’ll be reduced to anarchy. But whatever crimes Zachary Boyer committed, he long ago repaid his debt to society.

“It’s time society begins repaying its debt to Zach.”

In my first official act as President of the United States, I signed Zach’s full pardon.

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