Free DEAD BEEF (Our Cyber World Book 1) by Eduardo Suastegui

by name, and would say much less about its logo or what it represented.

 
     
    Chapter 11

    Martin Spencer arrived in Bishop, California shortly before 8PM. Normally one could make the drive from Los Angeles in a fraction of the time it had taken him, but he had purposefully made a circuitous and slow go of it.
    Just before reaching Highway 395 earlier in the day, he stopped at a Costco and traded a crisp $100 bill for two cases of bottled water and two boxes of granola bars. That gave him not only some basic sustenance, but also smaller bills that wouldn't attract as much attention at gas stations and restaurants. Even when avoiding credit card transactions to avoid detection, one had to be careful with what cash to flash.
    Along Highway 395 he took several turnoffs onto small towns or side roads, some of them dirt paths. He stopped and circled often to ensure no one was following. As towns became less frequent and high desert terrain more expansive, he would turn off onto dirt roads, drive a ways, stop, get out of the car and listen. He would listen for a few minutes and scan the sky to convince himself that he had no aerial surveillance.
    All this made his drive both long and mentally exhausting. Martin loved nothing more than hitting the open road and getting lost in his thoughts. He could enjoy none of that now.
    He arrived in Bishop hungry, tired, and with aches on his shoulders and neck he couldn't shake. The brief conversation with Odehl, carried out at his last off-road stop before Bishop, had left him with a headache.
    He first stopped to refuel his Toyota FJ and the two spare gasoline cans that hung from the back of the vehicle. After paying with $20 bills, he headed for a local diner to get a real meal.
    Martin found the diner nearly empty. The few souls there seemed to notice him a bit more that he cared for, but he told himself that his unkept look, dingy cap and pony tail, now well rounded by a couple of days of facial stubble were the main culprit. He reminded himself he'd found no evidence of an APB on him, and even if one was out, the blond  ponytail guy that had just walked into the diner looked nothing like clean-cut, brown-haired, always in a tie Martin Spencer.
    His earthy meatloaf and mash potatoes dinner went uneventfully, though he wondered how his digestive system, used to a much lighter diet, would react in a couple of hours. For good measure, he decided to add evidence that this meal was nothing Martin Spencer would eat by capping it with peach pie a la mode.
    Somewhere between his third and fourth bite, he noticed the waitress and three patrons gathering by the counter around a small flat panel television set.
    “Would you look at that,” the waitress was saying.
    “They've turned L.A. into a light show.”
    Martin went over to the counter to take a look. The bottom of the screen read, “L.A. FLICKERING ON & OFF”

    Though he toyed with the idea of renting a motel room, and tempting as it was to watch TV news about the L.A. power outages, Martin stuck with his original plan. He drove 40 minutes north of Bishop, found a turnoff and slowly drove off-road for another 20 minutes into an empty patch of desert.
    By then his stomach was churning violently. He wanted to blame the rich meal he'd just eaten, but he knew that had little to with it.
    Martin brought out his satellite phone, and mounted it and one of the laptops on the Toyota's front hood. When everything was up and running, he ran two scans of the Los Angeles area power grid. Each returned the familiar bit pattern, the one Julian had inserted as “filler dead code” into his payloads as a joke only he found funny: a string of 32 32-bit words, each spelling “DEAD BEEF” in hexadecimal code, except for the 32nd and last word in the sequence which spelled “1D0A BABE.” Martin knew this was no coincidence, but checked the binary bit stream, straining, his nearly inbred ability to convert ones and zeroes to hexadecimal returning to