I’m firing up something painful for him—maybe a nightmare, maybe a seizure—when Sara saves me the trouble. She dodges his slow, clumsy punch and knocks his arm aside with a sharp block.
He bellows and swings again. And she beats him stupid.
She is magnificent. No other word. Hand-to-hand, she takes the guy down like she’s swinging an ax into a tree. Openhanded blows to his neck and gut. Kicks to his knees and ankles. Six-plus feet of Icelandic outrage falls to the floor in pieces.
That gives the other men in the mob pause. I can feel their anger start to break apart, quicker than back in Houston. That rage. That surrender to a bigger, simpler feeling. It starts to wash back as they see that there might be a personal consequence for their actions, that their victim is not as helpless as they thought.
But it works only for those who can see it. The others behind them are still just a mob. And they are shoving forward, drunk, angry, shouting. There’s no handy sprinkler system to cool them down this time. And I’m starting to get caught up in it again. Feeling the rage. Wanting to do harm. To fight back. To make someone pay.
So I think hard.
Consequences. That snapped a couple of them out of it. People get angry, they forget their actions have consequences. Or they just don’t care.
Let’s see if I can remind them.
This is going to be tricky. I am not good with crowds. But this isn’t really a crowd, is it? It’s a mob. And mobs are notoriously single-minded.
I reach out. Find that humming string of outrage, connecting all of them. And pull on it, straight into the mass that they’ve become. A direct line into all of them at once.
It suddenly occurs to me that I have never done anything like this before. I could be looking at a stroke or a complete mental breakdown.
But it’s too late now. We are surrounded. And I’m in their minds. All of their minds.
I light them up. I overload the pregenual anterior cingulate cortex in all of them. That’s the part of the brain that is responsible for detecting errors, for embarrassment and guilt and shame.
For a brief instant, in every one of their heads, it’s as if there is a searchlight from a police chopper fixed on them, showing the whole world what they are doing. They are all exposed in that bright light, on display. For a second, it’s like the whole world is watching them. Judging them.
Imagine having God or your grandmother catch you with one hand in the cookie jar and the other on your privates. That’s what they all feel now.
That stops most of them cold. They snap out of it.
Some of them, however, could give a damn. They are pushing past the ones who are frozen with shame, still snarling. They know what they are doing. And they are perfectly content to keep doing it.
But there are a lot fewer of them. And it’s easier for me to pick them off, one by one, with pain and suffering I draw from my mental deck. This one with the bottle in his hand gets crippling gastrointestinal distress. That woman with her nails like claws suddenly finds herself unable to move her legs and falls flat on her face. The guy with the shaved head still screeching about foreigners chokes as his lungs suddenly tighten.
Now we’ve got a clear shot at the door. This time, we’re not waiting around for the police. We’re just getting the hell out of here.
Sara, despite everything, is smiling as she takes my hand and we run.
But what the hell, I’ll take it.
After we lose the angry Icelanders, we sprint, breathless, all the way into our hotel, me still clutching Sara’s hand even though the danger is long past. There is no one behind us—I sensed it when they gave up, several blocks ago—but we don’t let go.
Most of her buzz has evaporated, burned off by the sudden adrenaline rush and the sprint through the cold street. There are a lot of conflicting thoughts running through her head at top speed now.
She thinks of Stack. But not for any of the reasons I would have guessed.
The knot that binds them finally loosens enough for me to see how it was tied. I get a clear look into her memories.
She was raised on Long Island, a nice, middle-class girl from a nice family. She had a cousin, a young man who was terribly abused by his stepfather, a mean drunk. Her dad’s sister—his mother—didn’t want to go to the cops. But when her cousin collapsed at school with the pain from a broken collarbone, her dad was done being tolerant. He didn’t rush over and beat the man to death, although that was probably his first instinct. Instead, he showed up at the doctor’s office and simply brought him home. To Sara’s home. He told his sister and her husband that it was out of their hands. His nephew was living with them now.
And if his stepfather ever showed up again, then her dad promised to cripple him.
She remembers her cousin weeping and thrashing in the night in the spare bedroom. He had problems even before the beatings began, and he was broken in a lot of ways. It was not always easy having him around. But she thought he was getting better.
Then, a year later, when her cousin was fourteen, he simply left. Walked away from all of them with the money in his wallet and a duffel full of clothes. Didn’t leave so much as a note.
To this day, she has no idea what happened to him.
When she met Stack, she saw the same damage in him. He found himself revealing his own abuse, his own beatings at the hands of his father. How he was starved, sometimes for days, for minor violations of the family rules. How any interest in girls or sex or anything Stack’s father considered ungodly would lead to horrible retribution. She knows how deep those wounds go because she lived under the same roof with someone who also suffered them. It also didn’t escape her notice that he ran away from home at the same age as her cousin.
They fit. She needed someone to rescue. And he needed someone to protect him.
Mostly, Sara thinks about the awful waste of Stack’s life. He has more money than most people can even imagine. But he is still confined by his father’s strictures.
She remembers the last time he was on dry land. She accompanied him to a business meeting, and then he decided to get dinner. That in itself was unusual, because he usually just survived on those protein bars. They ate at one of those fifties diner places, burgers and fries and oldies on a real jukebox. Stack ate his burger and even most of his fries, and did not look even a little guilty. The waitress offered him a hot fudge sundae for dessert. It came with the meal, she said. No extra charge.
He sat there, and she could see him struggle. He practically vibrated in his seat; he wanted it. She wanted to tell him, It’s just a stupid dessert. Go ahead and get it.
But he wouldn’t. He just couldn’t get past whatever cage had been built inside his head.
And now he’s looking at time in a real prison, despite all his genius and his money. Despite everything he has, she thinks about how little time he’s actually spent as a free man.
Sara is thinking hard about that. About how tomorrow is never what you expect. How people can vanish right in front of your eyes.
She’s watching me closely. I can feel it. As soon as we are in the elevator, I barely catch my breath before our eyes meet. Sara’s are shining with something wild and she does not look away. She’s made her decision.
“Now?” I ask, because even though I can hear her thoughts, there are times when I am a wildly optimistic listener.
“Now,” she says, and pins me back against the wall of the elevator even as I move toward her. Her mouth is on mine, her tongue pressing, exploring, tasting. She’s got my jacket off and I’m pulling at her blouse as th
e elevator doors ding.
We pause for breath, look up, and rush past the elderly couple waiting patiently for us to leave the elevator. They both give us little smiles, and then they share a little memory of an elevator of their own, many years before.
I don’t really care. I am fumbling with the key card, doing my best to open the hotel room door without surrendering a square inch of contact with Sara. The (goddamn) lock finally clicks, and we go tumbling into the room.
She is on top of me on the bed. She pops the buttons off my shirt and then tears her own off as well, followed quickly by the bra. For a moment, I simply look at her, above me. I want to pause and burn the image in my brain.
But her thoughts are still a drumbeat.
So I flip her on her side and pull her skirt and panties down. She gets my suit pants off me by pulling and kicking.
Then I am inside her, in her mind and body, together. We are desperate together, rushing, pushing, moving, kissing.
Until finally we collapse into each other. For a moment, I am just panting, trying to catch my breath. She curls into me.
What seems like almost no time later, she lifts her chin and looks up at me. Her eyes are still bright. I hear her thought, loud and clear.
I wake long before Sara. She is deeply unconscious and facedown in the hotel’s thick comforter and pillows while I go through my usual morning routine.
First I hit the floor and curl into a ball while my brain replays all the pain and injuries I inflicted with my mental tricks last night. The worst is a phantom pain in my side, which I realize is a leftover from where Sara hit the big guy last night and cracked one of his ribs. I sweat it out until my muscles unclench enough for me to reach my bottle of OxyContin. I dry-swallow two and sweat some more until they start to work. After that, I get up and stagger to the bathroom, where I grab the Vicodin and diazepam and the Paxil from my shaving kit and gulp those down to help the Oxy. I shudder under the sudden weight of a lingering feeling of guilt left behind by touching the minds of the mob. So I crank the knobs to hot in the shower and stand there until my meds start to work in harmony and all I feel is the water.
Thirty minutes later, I am dressed, looking reasonably human, and drinking coffee delivered by room service. It’s not until I click on the TV and open the blinds that Sara finally stirs from her coma.
For a brief second, she’s disoriented. There’s that moment of hotel room panic, and then memory and habit kick in, and she forces herself to breathe deeply and normally. She lifts her head—I get a nasty sloshing feeling, about 10 percent of her hangover—and looks at me through one eye. The other is still gummed shut with sleep.
“Morning,” I say, handing over the coffee and half of one of my Vicodins.
She accepts both. There’s very little that’s verbal going through her head at the moment. I’m not surprised. After everything that’s happened in the last couple of days, it’s totally natural to want to stop thinking for a while.
“Thank you,” she says. “What time is it?”
“Almost noon, Greenwich Mean Time.”
She smiles. “You know, I’ve heard that for years, and this is the first time I think I’ve ever really understood it.”
She pauses. She sees herself in the hotel room mirror, and a jolt of embarrassment runs through her. She remembers some of the things we did last night. She felt free, blew past her usual inhibitions. But in the morning light, they’re clamping down again. Along with the hangover that’s squeezing her temples like a vise.
“Ah, listen. This is not—usually—me,” she says.
“I know,” I say.
“Seemed like we did most of it right. Not to brag.”
I almost get her to laugh with that one, but she stomps down on her amusement. She wants to finish what she’s saying.
“I’m just saying that I don’t usually act like this.”
“Well. You have had a lot of people shooting at you lately.”
She looks at me carefully. I can see her measuring, weighing, judging. I get a glimpse of myself through her eyes. That weird shock of recognition. It never really goes away.
In her mind, I look too calm. Too put together.
“Doesn’t seem to bother you that much,” she says.
“I’ve had a lot more practice.”
“You’re telling me you get used to it? People trying to kill you?”
She is asking me for a lot of reasons. So I consider the question carefully before I answer.
“For me, that’s when the world makes the most sense,” I tell her. “That’s when the masks drop. At least no one is playacting anymore.”
“And you get to hit back,” she says.
“Yes.”
“You like that part?”
“I prefer the honesty.”
Then we both hear something out of the burble of meaningless words from the TV.
CNN is the background noise in every business-class hotel and airport in the world. It’s almost soothing, the endless scroll of death and disasters and politicians screeching at one another, because it’s always there and never seems to change. So it’s easy to ignore most of the time, until you hear certain key words that break through the drone. Words like “mass shooting” or “attack” or “terrorism.”
Or, in this case, “Downvote.”
Sara looks up, now fully alert. I turn around to see the screen. It’s right there, spelled out across the bottom of the screen: IS A WEBSITE TARGETING INNOCENT VICTIMS FOR MURDER?
“Oh no,” Sara says. She finds the remote and quickly turns it up. The volume rises just in time for us to hear Wolf Blitzer waffling over images of a house marked off by crime-scene tape.
“—appears that a random threat was called in to police by someone claiming to be holding hostages inside the house, a tactic called SWATting. It’s used all the time by people online, but what makes it different this time is that a website has taken credit for the entire shooting. It’s called Downvote, and it is a hit list of celebrities and random people from social media who have become targets of an online mob—”
The story is brutal: police in Atlanta were alerted to a possible hostage situation by a 911 call. But the house where they showed up belonged to a local attorney known for his annoying personal-injury ads. His thirteen-year-old daughter heard someone at the door and was knocked unconscious by a cop carrying a battering ram. The attorney’s wife was hit by a tear-gas canister fired into the house, which exploded and gave her and their younger daughter third-degree burns. The attorney himself was shot in the back when it appeared he was reaching for a gun. It turned out to be his phone.
All because someone didn’t like his ads on television, which promised big payouts in the name of justice. The bullet hit him in the spine.
Along the bottom of the screen, viewer comments on Twitter are scrolling past. The one that catches my eye is HAHAHA!!! Who’s he going to sue for that?
Then, there it is. The familiar front page of Downvote, listing names of targets. Wolf helpfully informs us that we are watching the site in real time. “As you can see here, literally millions of people are now voting and adding names to the board, people that they want to be hurt, to be punished, and even killed. We have a report that this site may be connected to the mass shooting in Santa Monica recently, where reality-TV star Kira Sadeghi was grievously wounded—”
Back in Los Angeles, I bet Vincent just got his task force. Too damned late to do anyone any good.
Downvote just went public. Godwin’s experiment in antisocial media is out in the wild now. And the whole world is rushing to see, adding more people, putting more eyeballs on the site. Spreading the contagion.
What was it Stack said? “I don’t have to raise an army. I just have to op
en a floodgate.”
My phone rings. I don’t even have to look at the caller ID.
“This is your fault, you know,” Godwin says.
I tap the speaker icon so Sara can hear. “How do you figure?” I ask.
“I was willing to let the site stay on the Dark Net before you began poking around. For at least a few more months. You forced me to move up my timetable. So every extra casualty, every new kill, that’s all thanks to you.”
“So turn it off. Prove you’re really the good guy here. Shut it down.”
There’s a pause, and then the static chuckle. “No. I don’t think we’ll be doing that.”
Sara has cast off her hangover and the blankets and is tapping furiously at her computer now. She’s trying to reach Stack, to get him online so he can trace the call or Godwin’s Web traffic.
She’s also still naked, which is kind of distracting.
“I know you tried to take out my server,” Godwin says. “Moffett contacted me as soon as you left his house. That’s why I was ready for you.”
Not that ready, I think. But he doesn’t seem to know that we managed to access the server despite his hired ninja. He’s just arrogant enough to assume that because the server went offline, he managed to stop us.
“Right. Because you could give a damn about anyone who gets hurt. So don’t tell me this is my fault, Godwin. You started this. But I will finish it.”
“You talk like a movie poster, you know that?” Godwin says. If not for the voice synthesizer, I’d swear I could hear the irritation in his voice. He sounds pissed off, but in the same way you get angry at the waiter who brings you the wrong drink.
Sara gestures to me. She’s got Stack on the laptop now. Text only, which is fortunate, because I’m pretty sure his head might explode if the camera was on.
I read through the messages quickly.
stack: was able to get most of the data from the server
stack: still can’t track him directly
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