“What?”
“A serious infection with a life threatening fever. This doctor, Coley, was the first to notice the connection. Made this thing called Coley’s Toxins—nasty bacteria that could kill you. But if you’ve got a cancer in your system that will definitely kill you, then introducing a fever via a nasty bacteria isn’t that much of a risk.”
Jake shook his head. Sheldon was always going off on tangents, but he had to give it to him—the kid was a genius. In three days he’d managed to get the Bluebridge core up and working at the Mohawk facility. “So what did it do?”
“By inducing a massive fever, these bacteria triggered a heightened immune response to all threats in the system.” Sheldon beamed at Jake. “Don’t you see? That’s exactly what we’re doing. There’s a cancer in the global organism, and we’re going to poison it to trigger an immune response.”
A tingling sensation crept from Jake’s scalp into his fingertips—we’re poisoning the world—then settled into a fluttering in his stomach. Sheldon’s analogy was bang-on.
“I hope to God we don’t kill the patient on the table,” Jake said from between clenched teeth. What was that expression his dad loved to use? In for a penny, in for a pound.
He grabbed Sheldon’s chair and moved it in front of the computers. “Sit down. It’s time to inject more toxin. And get Dean on video chat.”
▲▼▲
Chase Rockwell stared out his window at the rain, the lights of Manhattan visible at his feet through the fog and clouds. The excitement of the other day—meeting the disheveled patriarch of the Albanian mafia, and then reading the memory key the old man had dropped, which detailed his assets and holdings—had been replaced with a frenzy of conflicting news stories erupting across the world’s media outlets.
But that wasn’t what worried Chase.
The DOW Industrial Average plunged two thousand points in an hour, forcing regulators to close down trading early on the NYSE and even the NASDAQ. Already they were calling it the Terrible Tuesday Flash Crash. There had been another flash crash the day before on the Luxembourg Stock Exchange. That one they blamed on automated agents fouling up the high speed trading systems. The crash in New York had been caused by convulsions over the presidential spoofing on network television.
The problem was that Chase had to freeze their own trading systems in the melee, and when the NYSE and NASDAQ went offline, they were stuck. He wasn’t sure where their accounts had ended up for the day. The potential exposure to financial losses was frightening, especially as it wasn’t clear if the markets would open the next day.
A knock on the door.
“Come in,” growled Chase, pulling his eyes from the rain-streaked windows.
His new intern’s head peered around the corner of the door. “I have the results.”
“Get in here, then.”
Chase steeled himself for the worst.
He didn’t really care about what happened to his clients. Sure, it would be better for PR if they didn’t lose their shirts, but he was worried about his own personal funds.
His intern came in and closed the door, then walked toward Chase. Instead of looking scared, the little bastard was smiling.
Chase couldn’t help noticing the brogues the kid wore. They looked like they were right out of Bloomingdales. When would someone have the sense to tell interns to spend $700 on a good pair of Gucci or Prada loafers? They lasted three times as long, and didn’t make you look like a walking douche bag.
“What’s the smile for?” Chase barked.
The kid’s suit was a disaster as well, off the rack from Barneys or Bergdorf. What on Earth could he be smiling about? It was a bloodbath, one of the biggest single-day disasters Chase had ever seen on Wall Street—never mind the goddamn suit.
“Look at this,” his intern replied, closing the last few feet and dumping the sheaf of print-outs into Chase’s hands.
Chase ignored the cuffs on the kid’s suit pants and focused on the numbers in front of his eyes. He blinked once, then twice. “When are these from?”
“Today. Right now,” his intern replied. “Those new automated trading algorithms we installed a few months back, they react faster than any human—”
“Yeah, I remember.” Chase studied the numbers again, his annoyance with the kid’s outfit fading. For these kinds of numbers, the kid could come to work in a duck suit for all he cared. “Good work.”
Grabbing the report, he turned and dismissed the intern with a wave of one hand.
“Thank you, sir.” The intern hovered, then turned and started out.
Chase smiled as he studied each line item.
In any storm, there were opportunities.
This was good.
His smile faded.
Maybe too good.
His smile returned. There was no such thing as too good.
Outside his window, lightning flashed.
42
Kahnawake Indian Reserve
Quebec
“Sorry, miss, but you’re going to have to go around,” Peace Keeper Daniels explained, pointing down the bridge’s off-ramp, the one leading away from Kahnawake. “You’ll have to take the 132 to the 30, not more than twenty minutes to get into Chateauguay.”
The young lady in the Mazda hatchback was too keyed up to pay attention to his directions. “Sauvages!” she yelled in French, gunning the engine of her car and peeling away. She held her hand out the window, giving Daniels the finger to make it clear what she meant.
Savages.
She meant the Mohawks.
Shaking his head, Daniels straightened up and stared down the length of the Mercier Bridge past its towering metal gantries. It was the main connecting point to Montreal Island from this side of the St. Lawrence River, a million people on each side wanting to get across—and it was jam-packed with traffic moving at a crawl.
It was rush hour, but the real problem was that, last night, the Mohawks had blockaded the main highway artery that ran through Kahnawake and into the countryside beyond.
It was Peace Keeper Daniels’s job to try and do just that, keep the peace.
Shielding his eyes from the setting sun, Daniels walked back to his cruiser and sat on its hood, waving traffic past, enduring the angry stares and comments from commuters.
Doug Hamer had texted him a warning the previous day, before the attack on Dean, so he alerted the local Mohawk Warriors as soon as a suspicious car pulled up to the Mohawk Institute of Technology building. Still, Daniels had never expected covert US agents would try to kidnap Dean.
Not in his wildest imagination.
Something was going on. Daniels hadn’t been told what, but he trusted Dean. It wasn’t just being Mohawk. They’d served together in the Marines. Semper Fi. Daniels didn’t need an explanation, not if one wasn’t offered.
It was a beautiful sunset, and he tried to enjoy it.
The Longhouse Elders had voted to enact the blockade last night. Daniels could understand their choice, and besides, he knew there was more to it than the Elders’ refusal to sanction the auditing of their online casino business. Anyway, the Mohawks hadn’t blocked the entire bridge, not like they’d done in 1990 in the land dispute with the government back then. This time they’d only blocked the off-ramp onto the highway that ran through their land.
The vehemence of the public reaction to having to take a detour was swift and nasty, the storm of public outrage directed at the Mohawks totally out of proportion. Barely twenty-four hours since they set up the blockades, and there were already scathing stories flooding Canadian and US media.
On the Canadian side, it was simple enough: people feared the economic sanctions that the US Congress threatened to impose. In the US media, it was a different beast. On many websites and in many publications, there was puritanical raging about breaking Federal gambling restrictions, even though the Mohawks weren’t doing anything illegal.
Yep, thought Daniels, enjoying the last rays of sunshine, some
thing big was afoot, but he trusted the Longhouse Elders. And he trusted Dean.
From the corner of his eye he noticed something out of place.
A truck on the bridge.
Khaki green.
Men running in front of it, scattering the traffic to one side.
“Oh, no,” Daniels muttered under his breath. What were they doing here? How could it have happened so fast?
He opened the door of his cruiser and grabbed his radio.
▲▼▲
“What do you think, Mr. President?” Dean asked.
He sat in the middle of a bird’s nest of wires and equipment strewn around the Link Room in the MIT building.
The President of the United States pursed his lips, frowning. “This was premeditated. There’s no way that they could have invoked Section 275 of Canada’s National Defence Act so quickly.”
Dean agreed. “Bluebridge must have seen this coming.”
He got the call from Peace Keeper Daniels up on the Mercier Bridge. The Canadian Army—the 5th Mechanized Brigade—had arrived at the Mohawk blockade. Not long after, Dean received an email, forwarded from the Mohawk elected council, informing him that the Quebec Premier requested military support, and the Solicitor General of Quebec had agreed.
The speed of the government’s reaction was as staggering as the public outcry. Dean had thought that the public would support the Mohawks, but it was the opposite.
They’d become isolated on the world stage.
Even worse, the snap decision by the Longhouse Elders to blockade Kahnawake had split the Mohawk nation itself. The elected council of the Mohawks, usually in tacit agreement with the traditional Longhouse Elders, didn’t agree. They argued to open the blockades, to let the government in. The big problem was that Dean and the small group of Elders who knew the truth couldn’t reveal the larger nature of what they were up to.
The outside world thought they were hiding something about their casino operations. It was too risky to reveal to the wider Mohawk community that they were trying to fight an indomitable artificial intelligence that had infected global networks. Nobody would believe them. Even attempting to explain would jam everything up. Right now they had to keep their attention on the job at hand.
“History is written by those who win the fight,” added the President, talking to Dean on the video display window. “Focus on winning the battle.”
“You’re right, Mr. President,” Dean replied, “but I gotta talk to Jake now, okay?”
The President nodded. “I’ll stand by.”
The other thing Dean couldn’t reveal to the world was that they’d spoofed the President of the United States on live network television. MOHAWK functioned perfectly. The first synthetic personality they’d created was the President. There was an amazingly rich and detailed amount of public data on which to base the character.
Dean had spent much of the last two days talking to the newly created President. At first he was disappointed with its clumsiness, but after a few hours the interactions became eerily human.
And then eerily perfect.
It worked flawlessly—the detail of the video broadcast on television that morning had been scary. His President had even done a question and answer session. It was as convincing as it could get.
After the broadcast, Jake suggested killing off this instance of the President, but Dean asked to keep it running. Dean liked talking to him. He found the President to be amazingly perceptive, great for troubleshooting. Someone he could talk to honestly and openly.
A congressional inquest into ‘Fakegate’—as the media were calling the spoofed television broadcast—had already been announced, calling it an act of terrorism, but the firestorm it ignited was shaping up exactly as intended. The global stock markets had been sent into free-fall. But it wasn’t really the stock prices that Jake and Jin had been after—it was the derivatives markets, the options market where people could place bets on the future values of stocks.
Jake’s face opened in a video window after two rings. “You okay?”
Dean rubbed his temples and looked at Jake. He looked terrible—dark circles under his eyes, the purple bruises still there, one eye bright red where it had hemorrhaged. As battered as he looked on the outside, Dean knew Jake was doing even worse on the inside. “A bigger question is, how are you doing? Are you still getting those videos of Anna?”
Jake’s scowl softened and he closed his eyes and sighed. “Yeah.”
“You hang in there, Jake. This is going to work.”
“Yeah, it’s just—”
“I know… How’s Elle?”
“She’s good. She and Eamon are still searching, but they haven’t found anything.”
A video from Jake popped up in a message window on Dean’s display. It was a television broadcast of a uniformed Canadian Forces officer barking orders at a camouflaged Mohawk Warrior, their noses inches apart, up on the blockade on the Mercier Bridge.
The Mohawk didn’t flinch or budge. Just stared straight ahead.
“Are you seeing what’s happening on your bridge?” Jake asked.
Dean nodded. “I can’t believe the media is there already.”
“The media is always there,” the President added quietly. “The vultures are always circling.”
This situation could easily spiral out of control.
Young Mohawks flooded into Kahnawake from the other Mohawk nations—Akwesasne, Kanesatake, and many more—putting on black masks and jumping into the blockades. The simmering anger of past injustices that always burned just under the surface was boiling up, intensified by the public outrage being hurled at the Mohawks.
These weren’t country rednecks manning the barricades. These were ex-Paratroopers, Rangers, Special Forces, and Marines, and they were armed to the teeth with smuggled weapons.
If Dean had thought he was sitting on a powder keg before, now he was sitting on a lit one.
“This has gotten a whole lot more dangerous than I realized it would,” Jake said over the video link.
“Did you think Bluebridge wouldn’t fight back?” Dean snorted. “I knew this was going to get messy.”
Jake let go a long sigh. “Most of your people don’t even know what they’re fighting for.”
Sheldon and Jin waved from the background, stuffing their faces with pizza. Dean waved back. “They know why they’re helping. They’re fighting for their people. I know we’re trying to get your daughter back, Jake, but this isn’t just your fight.”
Jake looked away from the camera, then started slowly nodding before looking back. “Don’t you find it even the smallest bit ironic that you’re fighting to save the White Man’s ass, even as he’s trying to bust down your door?”
Dean smiled at that. “The White Man has no idea what we’ve done for him. I don’t expect him to start realizing it now.”
Jake laughed, but the smile dropped from his face.
Dean couldn’t imagine how hard this had to be on Jake. “We’re going to get her back.”
In the video feed, Jake clenched his jaw. “We need you to keep MOHAWK running for another day, maybe two. Can you hang on that long?”
Dean nodded. “I think so.”
Another problem was that the food and gas suppliers had stopped doing their rounds today. They were even refusing to answer calls from Kahnawake. Bluebridge must have organized a boycott, but they had enough supplies to hang on for two days.
And it wasn’t only the President they’d spoofed.
Sheldon’s ‘Group of Eight’ were making good use of Jin’s database of thousands of companies connected to Bluebridge—using MOHAWK to fake calls from directors to radio broadcasts, spoofing emails to investors, falsifying earnings reports. Anything to create chaos. The blogosphere had erupted in a secondary wave as some people recognized what was happening, but they didn’t realize Bluebridge was being targeted.
Only Bluebridge knew that.
Part of its secret weapon was its ability t
o attend multiple, simultaneous meetings, and to do everything remotely through phone or videoconference. With this seemingly unstoppable wave of spoofing, companies and governments were starting to demand meetings in person.
The goal hadn’t been to just send the financial markets into free-fall—the NYSE, NASDAQ, NIKKEI, LSE—but also to specifically target Bluebridge stocks. They’d also unleashed denial of service attacks against the websites of the major corporations Bluebridge invested in.
“Two more days,” said Dean. “I can do two days.”
“Keep your eyes on the prize, gentlemen,” the President added.
Jake groaned, “Have you still got that thing running?”
“Yep.” Dean nodded. He smiled. “Everyone should have their own leader of the free world.”
Jin stuck her head in front of the camera. “Are we ready?”
“We’ve put the ball in the air,” Dean said to Jin, “time for you to knock it out of the park.”
“I’m going to make this thing suffer for what it did to Shen Shi.” Jin smiled sadly. “Do you know what causes a financial crisis, Dean?”
“I don’t know. Losing a lot of money?”
“No,” she replied, “That’s the result. The cause is fear, and I’m going to put the fear of God into the markets.”
Dean stared at her. For a small Chinese woman, she sure could be frightening. “Good girl,” he replied. Jin winked and moved out of the camera’s view. “Do you need me anymore?” Dean asked Jake.
“Not for now. Why don’t you take a break?”
Dean exhaled slowly. “Yeah, time for a smoke.” He shut down the President, who nodded and said goodbye for now, and then Dean logged off.
He was alone in the Link Room. Dean had issued strict instructions that it was off-limits to anyone else. Walking out into the corridor, he exited to the back of the MIT building to stand on the second floor fire escape.
He lit a cigarette and took a deep puff, staring at the twinkling lights of the Kahnawake village past the trees in the distance, and then toward the Mercier Bridge and lights of Montreal that lit up the clouds in the sky.
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