Zero day code, p.7
Zero Day Code, page 7
part #1 of End of Days Series
A black Jeep pulled into the McDonald’s car lot, a small supernova of sunlight exploding off polished chrome and forcing Jody to wince and squeeze her eyes shut. Chad drove a Jeep but his was white and covered in pictures of, well… Chad.
Chad with arms crossed and muscles flexed, veins standing out like purple worms just under his aggressively tangerine-coloured skin.
Chad primal screaming, but looking like he’d never enjoyed himself more than he was at that very moment.
Chad grinning, with almost carnivorous delight, and three cartoon speech bubbles emerging from his vulpine smile.
‘Your workout is Chad’s warm up.’
‘Nothing tastes as good as Chad feels.’
And Jody’s personal fave, because it was so perfectly, stupidly, incomprehensibly Chad.
‘Unless you puke, faint or die, Chad has failed.’
That, that right there was Peak Chad. It seemed impossible she had ever married him, but of course she’d only done so after falling pregnant. Because she was an idiot.
Not for having Maxy, of course. That little boy was her life now. But marrying Chad? Jesus. She’d been young.
Jody sipped at the bottled water she’d bought and tried not to look at her watch. She knew he was late and by how much. Twelve minutes and counting. When you were playing one of Chad’s games, twelve minutes wasn’t even getting into extra time. She’d have to be here an hour for that, and she didn’t think he’d dare. Chad was already on a warning from the family court that he could lose access rights if he didn’t stick to the visitation plan. And one thing she would concede about her asshole ex-husband, he was crazy for little Max.
So crazy he might not give him back one day?
Jody took a sudden swig of the chilled water to shut out that treacherous whisper before it grew into a shout. The water was so cold, and she swallowed so much of it in one gulp that an icy spike shot up through her eyeball and into her head. She squeezed her eyes shut and tried to calm down. Her heart was starting to race.
Deep breaths, Jody. Deep breaths and sane thoughts.
She still had plenty of time to get Max to his playdate and her ass to Oakland, and these stupid rappers into the shoot for Dinostar. She was just freaking because it was hot, and she was frazzled, and she had less than twenty dollars to her name in the world. Both credit cards were maxed out. She couldn’t afford to fill the Honda’s gas tank and rent was due Saturday.
She was just stressed was all.
She kept her eyes closed, breathed in and out, deeply, three times, and opened them again. She imagined Chad’s Jeep pull into the lot.
But it didn’t.
Jody caved and checked her watch.
God! He was twenty minutes late.
Now she did begin to succumb to her fears, to that black rat of anxiety which attended every one of these handovers, quietly gnawing away at her stomach lining. Every. Single. Time.
She did not want to call Chad. She couldn’t call him.
He was the sort of asshole who picked up his phone while he was driving.
While he was driving her little Maxy.
She would call Elizeh.
She hated to be so weak, but Ellie was strong enough for both of them. Ellie would know what to do. She would drop bombs and burn bridges and nuke motherfuckers from orbit if that’s what it took to make everything right again.
Jody was reaching for her iPhone when it rang.
Ellie’s darkly handsome face filled the cracked screen and Jody felt a wave cool relief wash through her body. She grabbed up the phone, fumbling and almost dropping it. Her heart missed a beat. Possibly two. It was an old model. She could not afford to replace it.
“Ellie! Oh babe I’m so…”
But it was not Ellie. A man’s voice answered, speaking in a broad Australian accent she recognised immediately. It was Damien Maloney. Ellie’s boss.
“Hey mate. It’s me, Damo,” he said. “You better get over here. Maybe bring one of your reporter mates. Your girlfriend’s been grabbed up, Jodes. Bunch of floor-shitting Nazis from ICE just kicked down me doors and tried to take away half the fuckin’ kitchen. Fuck me raw, it’s not a good look just before lunch.”
Jody Sarjanen did not hear the last part of whatever Damien had said.
She was already running for the door.
“The fuck is this, Chris? You scrape this shit off the road coming over here?”
Elizeh Jabbarah did not like the look of the super-premium wagyu beef the distributor was trying to lay off on her. Maybe Chris was trying it on because she wasn’t Damo. Maybe because she wasn’t a man. The sous chef at Fourth Edition didn’t care. She wasn’t paying premium dollar for ordinary protein. And this sad looking tube of bullshit rib eye was very fucking ordinary.
“Ellie, come on, please,” Chris said, his tone beseeching. The kitchen space was busy with prep for lunch. It roared with the centuries old, intimately familiar fusion of rigid discipline and head-spinning chaos that Ellie loved, and hated, and could never imagine giving up. Cleavers crunched into bones as second year apprentices stood over their first-year charges breaking down a carcass on the butcher’s block. Directly behind Ellie, old Sandino muttered obscenely at the giant pot of master stock he had been tending for years, carrying it from one restaurant to the next, whispering pornographically to it every day, as though they were lovers, and their passion could only be kept aflame with the most profoundly lurid promises and erotic cursing. Pots and pans clanked and crashed together. Blenders whirred. Bones roasted for demi-glace. And dozens of sweating, tattooed kitchen warriors shouted and swore and laughed in half a dozen languages, from the lowliest dishwasher to… well, to her. She carried the rank of sous chef, but the kitchen was really hers, not Damo’s. Her crew all laboured with a fierce will to conjure something magical and extra from the produce of the earth.
Unfortunately, there was very little magic to the produce Chris was trying to sell her.
It wasn’t his fault. She knew that. The drought was into its fifth year now and wholesale prices of water-dependent inputs had nearly doubled in that time. The quality too, had suffered.
Ellie knew that. Everybody in the business knew it.
But giving Chris an even break wasn’t her job.
Damien paid her to run his kitchen, to protect his investment, his dream.
And his dream was not to charge a hundred dollars a plate for the sort of meat she could pick up at a fucking Costco fire sale.
“It’s not good enough, Chris,” Ellie said. “I’m not taking it. I’ll rewrite the damn menu if I have to, but before I do that, I’ll call the Kasitch brothers and tell them to give me whatever they’ve got at whatever price they feel like charging.”
Chris Kakris winced as though she’d pushed a boning knife in between his ribs. His family had been fighting a wholesale war with Jevon Kasitch and his clan for as long as Ellie had been rattling pans around the Bay. She knew it would hurt Chris to think he could lose Fourth Edition to them. That’s why she did it.
The sous chef was not just a chef. She was Damo’s fixer, his line commander and enforcer. When the Chronicle awarded Fourth Edition three Michelin stars, it was Damien Maloney as Executive Chef and owner who posed for the photos and sat for two interviews with Michael Bauer, but it was Ellie who gave them the freedom to sit around enjoying their confit of Tasmanian ocean trout with Do Ferreiro Albariño while Edition served up its usual three hundred lunchtime covers without breaking stride. Damo thoroughly enjoyed the fiction of calling himself the restaurant’s master chef, but he could barely burn a piece of toast.
“You know it’s the drought,” Chris complained. “This is what top shelf beef looks like now, Ellie. I promise you; this is the best I got. No, it’s not A5 or even A4. But you can’t get that no more. Not in California. This is the best anyone’s got.”
Ellie stood back and folded her arms, giving Chris her resting bitch face, but only at about half power. It was enough to undo most men, but Kakris had not survived in the Darwinian cage fight of San Francisco’s restaurant industry by wetting his pants every time a chef was mean to him. He doubled down. Offering up his phone.
“You call Jevon. Go on. I got that prick’s number in here. I’d like to see what that asshole tries to pass off as A5 Kobe these days, because Kasitch wouldn’t know his ass from boiled loose meat. You don’t even wanna talk to those guys. I know you don’t. You want the best, Ellie. Always the best, and it costs,” he stabbed his finger at her for emphasis. “It’s costs you—” stab “—it costs me.”
Chris jerked a thumb at his chest.
This was costing her time she didn’t have. Five more suppliers were due in the next half hour, and one of them, Gannaway, the seafood guys, she actually was gonna deep six. She’d already sourced an alternative supplier for the sea bass, oysters and crab on the menu, and it was gonna get real ugly when she brought the hammer down, because she was gonna do it in front of everyone just to prove a point. She also had to make sure they had a server coming in to cover Yasmin’s shift. She’d twisted her ankle hurrying down to the wine cellar last night. Natalie, the sommelier had something urgent she needed to clear up, and Ellie was praying it wasn’t anything to do with the fake French label scandal that Table Hopper had broken wide open last week. The online booking service was down. Of course. Some fucking tapeworm from UberEATS was ringing every goddamned day, trying to convince Damo to let a bunch of stupid kids on motor scooters drive her three-star masterworks of culinary fine art out into the burbs in plastic boxes for assholes who were too fucking lazy to pour themselves into an actual Uber. The tapeworm would not give up, even though the last time he’d called she had yelled at him so loud, for so long that the entire kitchen had come to a stop, before breaking into wild applause at the hurricane of foul-mouthed abuse she’d roared into the phone.
Ellie shook her head.
“I’m not taking the rib eye, Chris. It’s just not good enough. I will change the menu before I plate it up. But yeah, okay, the drought. I’m sick of hearing about it. What else you got?”
Chris Kakris’s expression was a study in rapid transformation. His shoulders slumped and his head dipped low when Ellie refused to take the proffered steak. His face went slack and dark when she said she was changing the menu. But a furtive stillness settled over him as she conceded his point about the drought. And it was as though his own personal sunrise had dawned when she asked him what else he had to offer.
He started to say, “I’ve got some excellent pork belly…” but Ellie never did get to hear the rest of the pitch. The controlled chaos of the kitchen stopped dead as the swing doors that gave onto front-of-house burst open and half-a-dozen burley men in tactical rigs and baseball caps muscled their way in. Frenetic but directed energy collapsed into mayhem as more agents pushed through the battered flyscreen door that gave out on to the rear alleyway where the kitchenhands normally took their smoke breaks and where Chris Kakris had parked his delivery truck.
“Chinga la Migra!”
“Immigration!” one of the men yelled out. “We have a warrant. Everybody stay exactly where you are and have your documents ready for inspection.”
A female agent in body armour emblazoned with three white letters, ‘ICE’, repeated the announcement in Spanish and Arabic, surprising Ellie. Most of her dishpigs and busboys were Spanish speakers, but apart from herself, only the barkeep Jim Elias had a passing familiarity with Arabic. Jim’s family originally hailed from some valley in the ass-end of Syria—It’s all ass end, he joked when she’d asked him about it once—but he was third generation So-Cal and his Arabic didn’t reach much further than jaddati and jaddi for grandma and grandpa. Ellie had a little more, but most of it profane and kitchen-related, picked up in the six months she spent carving meat from the spit roast at her first job, a kebab joint in Rockridge.
At the mention of ‘documents’, the sudden turmoil in Fourth Edition’s kitchen boiled over into madness, a genuinely desperate situation in a space that was dangerous at the best of times. Commercial kitchens are full of razor-sharp edges and super-hot things, and the sudden appearance of a fearsome and hated ogre like la Migra was not calculated to bring order to Ellie’s realm. Kitchen-hands attempted to flee. Agents leapt on them in flying tackles. Individual shouts and screams rose and surged together into a savage, incomprehensible din of riot.
Ellie did not try to impose her will on the scene.
She calmly but quickly took her phone out of a back pocket and dialled Damien’s number; his private cell known only to a handful of friends, family, and her. Even with the phone pressed hard up against one ear, and a finger jammed into the other, she had trouble hearing him over the uproar.
“Yeah, mate. What’s… what the fuck Ellie! What’s…”
“Shut up, Damo,” Ellie shouted. “It’s a fucking ICE raid. Call your lawyers right now. Tell Nick Perriam we need him and any other lawyers he can spare as of five minutes ago. I’ll try to sort this out, but it looks pretty fucked up. Forget about opening today.”
“I’ll sue these cunts,” Damien yelled. She had no trouble hearing that. His booming Australian accent fairly thundered out of the phone. “I’ll sue the agent in charge. I’ll sue the idiot judge who signed the warrant. Wait! Have they even got a fucking warrant?”
“Yes,” she shouted, eyeing the asshole waving it around like Willy fucking Wonka’s golden ticket.
“Fuck them I’m gonna sue the judge. I’m gonna…”
“Just get Nick down here, Damo,” she yelled over the noise. “Now!”
Ellie cut the call and fixed her radar on the man she assumed to be the agent in charge. Mostly because he was standing, shouting at everyone else, but not risking his own skin by diving into the general melee of scrummaging agents and kitchen-hands.
“You,” she yelled, pointing at him. “Gimme the warrant, your name and your badge number.”
There was no doubt that he heard Ellie’s voice, even over the thunderous din. He looked right at her. Then he went back to yelling from the side-lines. Ellie stomped up to him, bottling her rage and fighting fiercely against the desire to punch him in the face because he’d ignored her. She was too smart to lay so much as a finger on one of these assholes.
“You,” she shouted. “Warrant. Name. Badge number.”
He stopped shouting at his own people just long enough to say, in a conversational tone, “Are you Jabbarah? The boss?”
He had a way of speaking that managed to cut through the hurricane force noise of everyone shouting and fighting with each other.
“I’m Ellie Jabbarah. The sous chef. Damien Maloney is the owner. The boss. And who the fuck do you think you are? Every one of these people is legal. Damien doesn’t hire anyone who doesn’t have papers. We’ve got copies in the office. For everyone. I would’ve couriered copies to you. I can show you now, if you’ll just stand the fuck down.”
He looked at her and smiled.
“Nope,” he said, and with a nod to one of his deputies he ordered Elizeh Jabbarah to be arrested too.
8
The Junior Mints
James O’Donnell woke at the same time every day.
4.00AM.
Growing up on a cattle ranch meant beating the sun to work. His parents worked four hundred acres on the fringe of the Gallatin National Forest in south central Montana. Nestled within the folds of an isolated mountain range that punched through the plains sweeping up to the Continental Divide, the ranch was blessed with more than a dozen lakes fed by permanent streams running down from the towering, snow-capped peaks. The providence of good land and water did not guarantee success of course. You still had to work hard, and James had been tumbled out of bed every day of his young life, first to help his mother cook for the two or three ranch hands his father usually employed, and in later years to join those men in the cattle pens and out on the range. The mountains which surrounded them on three sides protected the farm from the hot winds sweeping west off the plains, but it did not spare man or beast from the heat of the western summer and gathering the cattle to work them in the pens—branding, vaccinating and castrating the herd, or weaning calves, or pregnancy-testing the cows—was best done before the sun climbed over the high saw-tooth peaks.
Rising early and taking the reins of the day was a habit that had settled deep into James’s bones. So deep that he could not shake it even after swapping out blue jeans and leather chaps for tailored suits and a laptop. He didn’t set an alarm. He simply came awake within five minutes of four o’clock, checked his phone on the nightstand by the bed and swung his feet out onto the carpet as he groggily scrolled through the notifications which had come in while he slept. There were dozens, most of them from the previous day. It looked like he was back online.
James flipped open the lid of his MacBook and the same cascade appeared on screen.
He made an instant coffee from the fixings in his room and drank it down black and sugarless. There was no pleasure to be had from it. He was simply kickstarting his metabolism.
He checked that his newsletter had gone out, which it had just after 2AM, changed into gym gear, and took himself down to the hotel’s small in-house fitness centre. There he did half an hour of cardio and twenty minutes of resistance training. He was the only guest using the gym at that hour, for which was glad. It meant he didn’t have to compete for the equipment. By the time he’d showered and changed, back in his room, he was hungry. He had fifteen minutes to kill before the Marriott’s dining room opened to guests and he used that time to quickly scan the news on his laptop for reports of yesterday’s hack.
It was the lead story on all of the national sites he checked, but also in many overseas outlets like the BBC and Deutsche Welle.
