Robert Ludlum's (TM) The Utopia Experiment (A Covert-One novel)

by Kyle Mills

  De Galdiano used a key to access the top floor and a few seconds later the doors opened onto a sea of cubicles inhabited by young programmers wearing everything from khakis and ties to pajamas. At the back, a massive office was visible through a glass wall that ran along the top of a meter-high stainless-steel band.

  The Spaniard mumbled a few greetings as they waded through the cubicles, but was visibly relieved when they got inside and closed the door behind them. The office was probably twenty meters square and looked a little like the dream bedroom of a grade-schooler. There were bicycles, vintage arcade games, and even a full-sized soccer goal full of balls. Video monitors along the ceiling, two terminals, and an enormous wet bar were the only things that hinted at adulthood.

  De Galdiano went to the closest keyboard, and after he tapped in a quick command the glass wall turned smoky. Randi took a position next to it, looking out at the hazy image of the people outside.

  “Can they see in as well as I can see out?”

  De Galdiano shook his head. “They’re just looking into a mirror now.”

  Randi pulled two guns from beneath her coat and tossed one to Smith. They were manufactured entirely from non-metal parts and worked a little like a semiautomatic flintlock rifle. A packet of gunpowder attached to a ceramic marble was projected into the back of the barrel by a carbon-fiber spring and then touched off by a spark when the trigger was pulled.

  While entirely invisible to metal detectors, the design had significant drawbacks. The clip held only five rounds and the reload time hovered around fifteen minutes.

  Zellerbach slipped past the Spaniard and took a seat in front of the terminal. “Can you get me in?”

  De Galdiano entered his password and a graphic of a slowly spinning globe came on screen. Zellerbach pointed to the bright pinpoints of light dotted across it. “Are those the LayerCake server farms?”

  “Yes.”

  “How many?”

  “Hundreds.”

  “No problem. No problem. I’m on it.”

  De Galdiano walked across the room and sat behind the other terminal in the room. “Are you sending your Internet profile worm, Marty?”

  “I’m connecting to the mainframe at my house now…Okay, it’s on its way to you.”

  Zellerbach’s profile worm was an incredibly sophisticated web bot that he’d originally designed to constantly search for mentions of him on the ’net and alter the pages to portray him as a particularly attractive combination of Abraham Lincoln, Albert Einstein, and Fabio. Later, he realized that it could also be used to get revenge on the people who had tormented him in high school. In fact, Smith occasionally still searched the names of a few of his football teammates when he needed a laugh. Last time he’d looked up a guy who had once given Zellerbach a very public wedgie, the web was wall-to-wall with reports of his arrest for shoplifting a box of extra-absorbent tampons from a 7-Eleven.

  “Got it,” de Galdiano said and then opened the program. A screen came up asking for the full name of the soon-to-be victim. He typed Christian Alphonse Dresner. A list of thirty-nine people by that name came up in the order of Google ranking. Not surprisingly, the man they were looking for was at the top.

  “How does it work, Marty?”

  Zellerbach was hammering away at his keyboard and it took a moment for him to answer. “There are a lot of different functions, but you just need the simplest. On the first screen, fill in the blank with words you want associated with him and the bot will start inserting them into web pages.”

  “Okay. But what are we going to say?”

  “Something that will make him unique,” Smith said.

  “How about that he has a dachshund fetish?” Randi said, still gazing out the window into the cube farm beyond.

  “Yeah, put that in,” Smith said. “But I doubt that’s going to make him completely unique. We need something else.”

  “He tried to drown his mother in Vegemite,” Randi said.

  This time they all turned to look at her.

  “What? I’ve got a million of ’em.”

  “Go ahead,” Smith said, feeling a surge of adrenaline twist at his stomach.

  The Spaniard typed it in and then let his hand hover over the return key. “What if your suspicions about Dresner are right and this is something he’s watching for? What if this is the trigger?”

  It was a risk that they’d discussed at length with Fred Klein before getting the go-ahead to try this particular Hail Mary. It seemed unlikely that Dresner would tie a trigger to what was being said about him on the Internet—thousands of pages were active at any given time, portraying him as everything from the second coming to Satan. But unlikely was admittedly not the same as impossible.

  “Randi,” he said, pointing to a laptop sitting on a chair made of Legos. “Get on that and pull up a live video feed.”

  “What feed?”

  “Anything that’s got people in it.”

  She knelt in front of the keyboard and tapped in a few commands. “Okay. I’ve got a webcam in Times Square. What am I looking for?”

  “People dropping dead,” Smith said, reaching out and hitting the return button. A counter started scrolling on screen as Zellerbach’s worm went to work modifying web pages with the terms they’d entered. A hundred records. A thousand. Ten thousand.

  “Anything?” Smith said.

  “Everybody looks okay.”

  Despite the powerful air-conditioning, a drop of sweat fell from his nose and splashed on De Galdiano’s keyboard. He’d just pointed a gun at the heads of a million people and clicked on an empty chamber. But he wasn’t done yet.

  Unbidden, the Spaniard opened a window to LayerCake and typed “dachshund fetish drown mother vegemite.”

  There were too many hits to go through individually, but a quick survey of them suggested that all related to Christian Dresner.

  “It worked,” de Galdiano said. “He’s unique in the world. For now.”

  “And you can access his personal search parameters?”

  “They’re stored in the same place as everyone else’s.”

  “Okay. Type in the changes, but don’t make them go live until I tell you to.”

  Smith took a step back and reached for the Merge on his belt. He hesitated for a moment but then flipped the power switch.

  Beyond the fact that his teeth were clenched tight enough that he could hear them grinding, there was nothing. Just the normal start-up counter and icons slowly populating his peripheral vision. Dresner would have no reason to expect that he would ever come online again and Smith had bet his life that he wouldn’t be watching.

  “You ready, Marty?”

  “It would take a year for me to properly prepare.”

  “I know. But can we do enough to scare the hell out of him?”

  “Oh, I’m going to put on a show. Marty Zellerbach always puts on a show.”

  73

  Near Vientiane

  Laos

  WE’RE FOLLOWING UP on the cargo plane that took off from Colombia, but we haven’t been able to track it or confirm that Smith and Russell were on board,” Deuce Brennan said.

  Dresner gripped the arms of his chair, feeling the pain of increasingly arthritic fingers. “So it would be fair to say you have nothing.”

  “I don’t know much about Smith, sir, but I can tell you that Randi’s no amateur. If she goes to ground, she’s going to be damn hard to find.”

  “Keep me informed,” Dresner said and then cut the connection.

  He remained seated, looking around the nearly empty room—the white walls, the single terminal in the corner, the sliding door cutting him off from the rest of the world. What now?

  It was possible that Smith and Russell had gone into hiding, correctly surmising that he was having them hunted. But it seemed unlikely. Had they informed their superiors about the hidden subsystem? About his plans? About his offer of a partnership? If so, he would expect to have been contacted—the Americans would want
to negotiate the most favorable deal possible.

  There was no choice now but to assume that they were going to attempt to stop him. But how? He was watching every network and power grid. Next-generation algorithms were tracking the Merge connections of every person of consequence on the planet, looking for any pattern that might suggest someone moving against him. The Internet and media were being constantly scoured for the vaguest hint that his plan had been discovered.

  But there was nothing.

  It would be easy to tell himself that he had planned for every eventuality, that they were acting entirely out of desperation. But Jon Smith was a more formidable opponent than that. If he was acting, he believed he had found an exploitable weakness.

  Dresner activated his usage application and a set of graphs appeared in the air ahead of him. Units online were moving upward on their daily cycles and would peak in another few hours. Five and a half million people would be active at that point, approximately 1.3 million of whom were targeted by LayerCake. It wasn’t enough—he was convinced of that. But could he afford to wait? Was it possible that Smith had found some flaw that he hadn’t considered?

  A quiet alarm began to sound, answering many of the questions and suspicions plaguing him. He rushed to the terminal against the wall, resenting having to use such a clumsy device, but forced to acknowledge his technology’s inability to process complex inputs.

  A screen displaying Merge networks came up and showed that the military’s satellite links had all gone down simultaneously. There was little question that Smith was to blame, but why? Only about nineteen percent of America’s soldiers were served by that network—mostly young, low-level infantry who wouldn’t have been targeted by LayerCake anyway. What could he possibly hope to accomplish that would justify the risk he was taking?

  The alarm varied in pitch and another window sprang to life on his monitor—this one showing some kind of virus attacking the servers in Canada. The system was rerouting traffic through excess capacity in Mexico but there was still a two percent slowdown worldwide. How could a virus have worked its way that deep into his system?

  Another change in alarm pitch was accompanied by a screen showing a T-Mobile network in Southern Europe crashing, along with a number of independent Internet service providers throughout North America.

  System security would be tracking the source of the disturbances and he pulled up the list, staring at it for a moment in disbelief. This wasn’t a coordinated effort by the NSA and their foreign counterparts—the entire assault was coming from two terminals in Javier de Galdiano’s office.

  Dresner tried to shut them down, but found himself locked out as disturbances kept appearing all over the globe. Two cable companies went down in California, increasing the slowdown to twelve percent and disconnecting more than forty thousand users. A server farm in Kansas went offline as the power grid began pulsing beyond the capacity of its surge protectors. The temperature of a critical switch in Arizona suddenly went outside of parameters and began its shutdown sequence.

  Dresner closed the windows on his monitor and brought up the videoconference software that connected him to de Galdiano. He didn’t expect it to work and was surprised when the screen was immediately filled with the image of the man’s office. In its center was Jon Smith, standing directly behind the Spaniard as he typed furiously on his keyboard. At the other terminal, working even more manically, was a bearded man whom he suspected was Martin Zellerbach. Standing at the nearly opaque glass wall was Randi Russell.

  “Javier! What are you doing?”

  He expected to see fear in the man’s face—some hint that he was acting under threat—but there was none in evidence when he looked up at the camera. He was doing this voluntarily.

  “They told me you’re going to use my algorithm to kill people, Christian.”

  “And you believed them?”

  “If they’re lying then I’ve made a bad mistake and you should fire me. But they’re not lying, are they?”

  A server farm in Thailand was overwhelmed but the Canadian virus had been isolated and that capacity was coming back online for a net increase in bandwidth. Worldwide, the average slowdown was hovering just under thirty percent; total users were sixteen percent below nominal levels.

  “No one screws with Marty Zellerbach!” the bearded man suddenly shouted. “I once key logged the computer of God himself!”

  Wild-eyed and obviously mentally ill, Zellerbach was nonetheless one of the best hackers in the world. With Javier’s cooperation, could he really threaten the entire network?

  Dresner moved to reset the servers in Thailand but found that the control system would now read out only in that language. Finally, he took a step back and used his Merge to connect to the head of the Granada campus’s security detail.

  “Yes sir, Mr. Dresner,” the man said, obviously shocked to be contacted directly by the founder of the company he worked for. “What can I do for you?”

  “There are people in Javier de Galdiano’s office trying to sabotage LayerCake. It appears that Javier is working with them—or perhaps even leading them. I need you to take control of those terminals at any cost.”

  There was a disconcerting silence before the man responded. “I understand, sir. But the elevators have shut down and the locks on the doors leading to the stairs have frozen.”

  Dresner slammed a fist down next to his keyboard. Of course Javier would have access to the computer controlling the building.

  “How long?”

  “We’re working on the locks now, sir. Less than five minutes to get a team to his floor.”

  “Five minutes?” Dresner repeated, taking another hesitant step backward. How much more damage would the system suffer in that time?

  “Do it,” he said and then shut down the connection.

  When he looked at the computer screen again, Smith was staring directly at him through the camera in the ceiling.

  “I’m almost there!” Zellerbach shouted, the spit flying from his mouth visible even with the marginal resolution of the image. “Once my new virus is uploaded, it’s lights-out. I guarantee you, Dresner’s never seen anything like it. No one has!”

  The beginnings of a smile played at Smith’s lips. And while it was nearly imperceptible, the look in his eyes was easy to read: Victory.

  There was no way to deny what was happening any longer. Dresner had to face the fact that he wouldn’t have the time necessary to change the world in the way that he’d dedicated his life to. A simple army physician had put an end to that dream. But he could still act. And he could pray that it was enough to give humanity a chance to save itself.

  Dresner met his adversary’s gaze, examining the smug expression for longer than he should have before expanding the icon that activated the Merge’s concealed hardware.

  “You have no idea what you’ve done, Colonel.”

  74

  Granada

  Spain

  W E’VE GOT COMPANY!”

  Smith turned toward Randi’s voice and looked through the smoky glass at the armed detail pouring from the stairwell. Programmers appeared over the tops of their cubicles, watching the men with a mix of curiosity and fear.

  “Everyone get down!” Smith shouted.

  Javier had dealt with these men for years and was already way ahead of him—dragging his terminal to the floor and lying flat next to it with his hand hovering over the enter key.

  Zellerbach, on the other hand, was lost in his own world—hammering away at his keyboard, muttering unintelligibly as he wreaked havoc in the world Dresner had created. Knowing that there was no point in trying to get his attention when he was like this, Smith ran at him and knocked him off his chair. The hacker squealed in protest, but was pacified when Smith moved the terminal to the floor in front of him.

  Smith returned his attention to the guards and saw them fanning out to cover a man yanking on the locked door to the office. The programmers wisely started bolting for the exits.
/>   “Any idea what kind of glass this is or how thick?” Randi said.

  “I didn’t build the place!” de Galdiano answered, flattening himself further on the carpet. “Talk to the architect.”

  She aimed her experimental pistol at the man trying to get through the door, lining up at an angle intended to keep a ricochet from bouncing back at her, then pulled the trigger.

  It turned out to be regular tempered glass and not particularly thick. The ceramic projectile missed the man on the other side, but did succeed in collapsing the entire wall in a spectacular shower. With the opaque barrier gone, they were now fully visible to the ten or so security men on the other side. It took less than a second for them to open up with everything they had.

  Randi dropped behind the meter-tall band of steel and Smith slithered across the floor to de Galdiano who, to his credit, seemed to be keeping it together. Randi aimed blindly over the wall and fired in the general direction of their attackers, but there wasn’t much else she could do. Dents began appearing in the metal behind her and the air was filled with the deafening ring of impacts. The barrier held, though. Security hadn’t brought anything designed to penetrate anything tougher than human flesh. Yet.

  Smith was only a meter or two from de Galdiano when an intense ache enveloped his right arm. At first, he thought he might have been hit, but that was something he unfortunately had a great deal of experience with. This was completely different—something he’d never felt before.

  “Javier!” he shouted, reaching for the switch on his Merge. “Now!”

  De Galdiano didn’t move and for a moment Smith thought he hadn’t heard. Then he saw the bloodstain spreading out beneath the motionless man. With a million lives at stake, he abandoned his attempt to turn off his unit and went for the keyboard. The pain intensified and spread to his chest, strangling it in a vise-like grip as he crashed down on top of the dead man. It became impossible to breathe and his right arm felt paralyzed. He reached out with his left, vision starting to swim, and let it fall on top of the blood-splattered keyboard.