by J. G. Sandom
As their waitress came over to take their order, Lulu’s phone started ringing. The call was restricted but she clicked on it anyway. It was the mysterious Mr. X once again. Lulu handed Decker the phone.
“Listen to me very carefully,” Mr. X said. “I don’t have much time. I’ve learned a few things. As I suspected, Zimmerman’s death was no accident.” He sounded out of breath, as if he’d been running.
“That’s not how it looks to us.”
“Look closer. Check his house.”
“Look, Mr...X. We have neither the time, nor the inclination to—”
“Check his house, John! Look closer. I’ve got to get out of here. It’s not safe for me here any longer. He’s on to me. On to you too. If you want to reach me, go to Amazon. Look for new reviews of your book, John—The Wave. You’ll figure it out. I have faith in you.”
“Who’s on to you? What are you talking about? Who’s on to us?”
“My life and your lives. They’re in danger.” Then he added, “And don’t order the scrapple, John. You know what it does to your stomach.” The phone died in his hands.
Decker handed the phone back to Lulu. He looked about the dining room, checking each patron, one after the other. “Turn it off, Lulu,” he said. “And take out the battery. They can track us as long it’s charged.”
“We’re not going home, are we?”
Decker picked up the menu again. “Not just yet.”
CHAPTER 32
Friday, December 13
Lulu rummaged about through her “bag of tricks,” as Decker had taken to calling her blue TWA tote. She finally found what she was looking for—some kind of electronic device. Moments later, she had ripped out a panel by the front door of Zimmerman’s house, connected the device to some dangling wires with a pair of alligator clips, and deactivated the burglar alarm. Then, using a tension wrench and a half diamond pick, she began picking the lock.
“Are you sure you’re doing that right?” he inquired.
Lulu looked up with disgust. “As my grandmother always says, ‘Do I come to your job and slap the dick out of your mouth?’”
“Really? Your grandmother says that? Your ninety-eight year old Chinese grandmother.” The lock suddenly clicked open. “OK. I take it back. How did you—”
“Don’t ask,” Lulu said, cutting him off.
Decker reached into his ski jacket and pulled out the Python he had picked up from the assassin in Georgetown. He held the gun up with both hands near his face.
“You really think we’re going to need that?” said Lulu. “The house is deserted. Has been for months, ever since Zimmerman’s death. The only people who ever come here now are the cleaning service—not due until Tuesday—and the real estate agent from Bondville Realty, who’s shown the place a grand total of three times since it was first listed. For some reason, in this robust economy, she’s having a hard time unloading a seventeen-million-dollar, one-of-a-kind contemporary. Go figure.” Lulu pushed the door open with the palm of her hand and climbed to her feet.
Decker slipped the gun back in its holster and followed her in.
To say that Zimmerman’s house was beautiful would be like saying that Da Vinci knew how to draw. The house was exquisite. More than 15,000 square feet, on seven separate levels, the structure appeared to inhabit the mountainside rather than to merely sit upon it. In fact, unlike most of the more imposing lots on Mt. Stratton, this one had not been bulldozed and clear-cut of its trees when the mansion was built. On the contrary, much time and effort had been spent ensuring that the root systems of the indigenous oaks, maples, white birches and pine were protected. Now, the trees grew through the house, as if the entire structure, each level, were an organic growth rooted to the mountain by the canopy.
As they made their way through the house, Decker could not shake the feeling that they were being watched, but Lulu assured him that the security system was off. She had triple-checked once they’d gotten inside.
At the topmost level of the structure, they came upon the master suite. Besides an impressive office made virtually entirely of glass so that it seemed to float above the forest canopy below, there was a spiral staircase surrounded on three sides by bookshelves, a maelstrom of different colored spines, leading up to a great balcony in the treetops, a cedar deck three hundred feet long, with an infinity pool at the end. Decker and Lulu stood by the swimming pool looking out over the valley. The trees were bare. Patches of snow sprinkled the higher elevations but most of the valley was clear. Only the runs above them were covered in snow. Man-made. Or, more precisely, machine-made.
Man made the machines.
From this angle, as Decker looked out over the lip of the infinity pool, it appeared as though the water were literally filling the cerulean sky, rising up in great clouds of steam from the fervid liquid beneath.
“Nice to be a Net billionaire,” Lulu said, staring out at the valley. “Kind of like Tarzan meets Koolhaas. You sure you don’t want to give up government service for your shot at an IPO?”
“He still ended up dead in a ditch.”
“Beaver pond,” Lulu corrected.
“Right. Beaver pond. I think it’s more Gaudi than Koolhaas.”
She came up beside him. For a second there Decker was convinced she was going to reach for his hand. Either that, or lean round and punch him. In either event, he was ready. But she pulled away at the very last moment.
“Still trying to picture him,” Decker said, “but I’m having a difficult time. What did he look like? Weird how there isn’t one picture of him anywhere in the house. Not one. Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, no problem. Julian Assange, Bono, Nelson Mandela—sure. But not one of Matt Zimmerman himself.”
Lulu shrugged. “Good looking guy. Didn’t like cameras, though. Said they steal your soul.”
They headed down the long wooden staircase back to the master suite. “I need to get to his lab,” Lulu kept saying. “That’s where we’ll find what we’re looking for.”
“And what exactly are we looking for?”
“I don’t know. I’ll know that when we find it.”
The lab was in the sub-basement, below the “cave” or wine cellar, which was under the cellar itself, carved into the side of the mountain. It came equipped with showers and sleeping accommodations for six, plus a breakfast nook, kitchen and pantry. In fact, it looked a lot like a bunker or bomb shelter—something some wealthy family in the 1950s might have constructed, in fear of some pending disaster—equipped with white leather Pop furniture and a real Salvador Dali. But the technology was anything but outdated. Decker had never seen anything like it, and he had worked at some very high-tech facilities during his tenure at the FBI, not to mention all those times he’d been loaned out to the CIA and NSA through the years. There were consoles everywhere, keyboards and tablets, various input devices, including a virtual reality headset.
Decker found himself fascinated by the VR equipment he saw. But he did not know why until he came upon what appeared to be some kind of 3-D printer, a stereolithographic device, in the corner. The VR headset was made of the same plastic material as the stuff in the printer tray.
Lulu was sitting by one of the terminals, typing away at a keyboard. She barely glanced up at Decker as he began picking at the plastic material. “Yep, it’s the same stuff,” she said.
There was some kind of metal robotic hand by the tray, Decker noticed, apparently designed to pick up finished objects and move them to an adjacent rinsing platter for cleaning. “What stuff?” said Decker, looking over at her. She kept typing away.
“That living LCD tissue taken from your Georgetown assassin. The material used in that bio-cyborg implant and the stuff in that 3-D printer are both examples of liquid UV-curable photopolymers, a substance used in rapid manufacturing and prototyping. Same with the VR equipment. They were all prototyped the same way. You design the part you want using any popular 3-D software package, and it’s automatically carved out of the photo
polymer using an ultra-violet laser—with incredible precision, in just a few minutes, and down to the tiniest detail. If you can draw it, you can build it. Virtually instantly.” She gasped. “Oh, my God.”
“Oh my God, what?” Decker said, gliding over to her.
Lulu’s eyes were fixed to her computer screen. She kept reading and typing away. “Give me a few minutes,” she said. “I think I’ve found something.”
Almost an hour later—after Decker had combed through the whole house, stem to stern, for the third time—Lulu called him back down to Zimmerman’s lab once again. She pointed to a stool by the 3-D printer and urged him to sit.
“What you got?” he inquired.
“Three things. First, Mr. X was right. Zimmerman’s death wasn’t an accident. He was murdered.”
“Murdered? Murdered by whom?”
“Not by whom.”
“What do you mean, not by whom?” Decker said. “By what, then? A beaver? A moose?”
“By his car.”
Slowly but surely, the story spilled out. Lulu had managed to hack her way into Zimmerman’s network. Much of his data files had been destroyed, entire drives and back-up systems wiped clean, but some of them she’d been able to reconstruct using tools from her “bag of tricks.” Apparently, she told Decker, it was his IP-enabled Toyota that had killed Zimmerman...or, more accurately, someone had manipulated his car to dispatch him remotely.
“How do you know that?” asked Decker. He was playing with some of the leftover plastic stuck in the fingers of the robot hand by the 3-D printer tray. It was gooey and soft, studded with chiplets, like clusters of silicon cells.
“Because I was able to perform a telematics diagnostic,” she said, “which revealed Zimmerman was traveling at a high rate of speed, more than ninety, when the pressure in his front right tire suddenly vacillated, and he crashed. See for yourself.” She spun the monitor about so he could see the screen from his stool. “The instruction to deflate the tire at precisely that moment was issued remotely.”
“Remotely? By whom?”
“This is the archived video footage, what Chief Brody gave me. But look carefully. Look at the road just as the car starts to skid. It’s hard to see in real-time, but not when you slow it way down.”
Decker stared at the screen. He could see Zimmerman’s Toyota as it moved in slow motion down the country road. Just before the car started to skid, a black mark appeared in the road—right in front of him, before Zimmerman had even put on the brakes! Another set of skid marks. Identical to the ones made by Zimmerman’s Land Cruiser. That’s when Decker remembered.
That guy with the sideburns, the one he’d interviewed at the tavern in Winhall. I almost skidded off the road there just a day or two earlier, he’d told him. Beaver came up out of the pond. I tried to avoid him and skidded. Bang! Hit the railing but didn’t punch through, thank goodness. It’s a dangerous bend. And someone had added, And you drive a Toyota as well. With the same brand of tires, no doubt, Decker thought.
“What you’re saying is that someone intentionally released the air in Zimmerman’s Toyota Land Cruiser in order to destabilize his car and cause his accident on exactly the same spot where someone else had had an accident and skidded because of some animal coming out into the road a day or so earlier.”
“That’s what I’m saying. Don’t you see? It’s perfect. If you’re going to kill someone, why not kill them on the same spot someone else had an accident. That way, it looks like some animal caused Zimmerman to jerk his own steering wheel, to cause his own accident, as opposed to some outside agent, someone who made him lose control at precisely that spot in order to cover his tracks.”
“But who issued the instruction to deflate the tire? Could you find that?”
“No. When I tried to track down the source, I couldn’t find the end of the root. It’s as if...as if the World Wide Web itself is responsible.”
“What does that mean?”
“I don’t know. It just doesn’t make sense. Whoever did this is a master,” she said. “He really knows how to code. It’s so...”
“So what?”
“So elegant, and yet so simple and clean. The kind of code that Zimmerman used to call ‘child’s play.’ And there’s more. Seeing what happened to Zimmerman made me wonder. What else was going on at that time in his life? Had he received any threats? Any ominous messages? And I don’t mean phantom trespassers.”
“Well, had he?”
“See for yourself. This video was Dropboxed to him only hours before his death.”
“What is it?”
“The video of a murder.”
CHAPTER 33
Friday, December 13
Lulu clicked at the keyboard and the video of Zimmerman’s Land Cruiser was replaced by the grainy image of a man holding the lens of a camera filming himself. He was a round-faced, Middle-Eastern-looking man in his late twenties with a thick nose, wispy black beard and mustaches. He was standing on a chair, holding the camera in his right hand, trying to fit it into position. A moment later, he stepped down off the chair, smiled up at the camera and gave it a thumbs-up.
“That makes six,” he said in English with a thick Scandinavian accent. “Now, I am covered completely. If anything happens, this footage and the scene that captures my...” He smiled grimly. “...my untimely end will be sent to you, Matt, automatically. I’ve arranged it. As you know, Piratbyrån and several other groups linked to Anonymous were creating botnets to help take down political enemies, such as when they tried to fuck over Julian by preventing donations to WikiLeaks. But, unbeknownst to me, unbeknownst to any of us, the code we were using included a snippet that gave control of the botnets to somebody else. Another source. A master controller. I still haven’t found out who, but I will. I will if it’s the last thing I do. The good news is, I found out what they’re doing. The bad news is, well...they know that I know. This is why I’m at the house at the sjö. To protect Alva and the family. This,” he said, waving at the cameras all around him, “is my insurance policy. Just in case. Or, perhaps, my revenge.”
The recording suddenly went grainy, like an old VHS tape. There was a flash of light and another camera picked up the scene. It was mounted outside on the porch of what appeared to be some kind of cabin in the woods, like a mökki or Swedish stuga, overlooking a lake. The same young Middle-Eastern-looking man was standing beside a glowing metal barrel. Inside the barrel, balanced against one side and away from the flames, was the flank of salmon nailed to a plank of wood. The man was tending the fish. He was also smoking a cigarette. He had a glove on his left hand, but his right hand with the cigarette was naked, exposed to the elements. He took another drag off his cigarette when another man loomed in from the side.
He was like a shadow. One minute, he wasn’t there. The next, he was standing over the Middle-Eastern-looking man, now apparently unconscious on the ground.
Decker gasped. As the stranger turned the body over, his face was captured by the camera.
The blond man with the scar from the hotel in Dandong. His Georgetown assassin!
The next thing Decker saw was the assassin stringing up the Middle-Eastern-looking man inside the cabin, using some sort of electrical cord. He made the scene look like a suicide.
The screen went grainy again. It flashed white for a second, when another camera picked up the narrative. Decker could just dimly see the receding back of the assassin as he trudged off, now wearing a rabbit fur hat, toward the lake. It had started to snow and it was difficult to track him through the heavy flakes as he stepped into a small boat, as he started the motor and slowly but surely made his way across the lake, finally vanishing behind a curtain of snow. Then the screen went black.
“The blond man,” said Decker, looking over at Lulu. “The guy who tried to kill me in Georgetown.”
“And Ibrahim Barzani,” said Lulu.
“What’s Piratbyrån and who’s Ibrahim Barzani? That’s a Kurdish name, isn’t it? What�
�s a Kurd doing at some stuga in Sweden?”
“The Piratbyrån—or Piracy Bureau, in English—is a play on the phrase antipiratbyrån, the lobbying group representing companies and organizations within the Swedish film and computer game industry commissioned to fight piracy. Piratbyrån was a group formed against such legislation. They fought for a free Net. Not free as in ‘free coffee,’ but as in the ‘free’ exchange of ideas. The group claimed that copyrights are largely a way for a few privileged businessmen to keep certain creative works under financial lock and key. Rarely do the artists themselves truly benefit. It’s the ones with the chokehold on distribution who clean up. The Web changed all that. Piratbyrån even developed a kind of anti-copyright protection logo called kopimi, pronounced and sometimes even spelled Copy Me, designed to signal that the work in question could and, in fact, should be copied. Kind of like the Creative Commons license except kopimi added that positive imperative.
“The kopimi concept and logo were created by Ibrahim Barzani back in ’05. His family had immigrated to Sweden from Kurdistan some years earlier. He was an artist at heart but he ended up founding both the Piratbyrån movement and Pirate Bay, the world’s largest illegal torrent downloading site. Bigger than Napster. Music and movies. Some say Piratbyrån was always designed to be a temporary group, to achieve a temporary political goal. But the final decision to disband came after Ibi Barzani died. Without the founding soul of the group, the movement could never be the same. His death was ruled a suicide. Barzani had always suffered from depression. After the company was shuttered, he and three other founders of Pirate Cove were sued and forced to pay major fines. Barzani was bankrupt, broken. And he had small children, so you can understand why the family wanted to keep details of his death out of the press. There was no hint of foul play.”
