Zero Sum Game

by SL Huang

“It’s personal, Russell.”

  “Fine.” I’d bug Checker to tell me later, if I remembered. I cast about for a change of subject. “Let’s check out these lists of numbers, yeah?”

  “They won’t mean anyth—” Arthur tried to insist, but I interrupted him with a glare.

  “Go—go dry off,” I instructed tiredly. “I’m going to waste my time looking at a completely meaningless file. Okay?” He looked as though he wanted to argue, but he complied.

  I pulled over the laptop and opened it. Sure enough, a new email showed bold at the top of my inbox, encrypted with my public key. I sighed. It wasn’t like my public key was secret, but the fact that Checker had had it on hand was just annoying.

  I uncompressed the file, and the computer locked up for a full sixteen seconds while it opened. The thing was long. Very long. And as Checker had said, it consisted mostly of contextless numbers, some of them arranged into tables, others spinning out into protracted lists. I scrolled through pages, and pages, and pages.

  I let my eyes unfocus. Let my brain relax. The numbers slid over each other, rearranging, realigning. Some joined into armies, others popped up and shouted, drawing attention to themselves. Patterns crossed and recrossed. Numbers. Numbers. Numbers…

  “Cas.”

  I looked up. Rio stood over me, his hand on my shoulder. Arthur, clean and dry, was watching me with some concern. I realized that I was still quite wet and very cold, and that my whole body ached and wanted to start shivering. But it didn’t matter.

  “Cas,” said Rio, “Keeping the bandaging clean and dry is medically important.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Rio, I know how to take down Pithica.”

  “How?” asked Rio.

  My lips twisted into a feral smile. “By using math. We’re going to destroy them economically.”

  Chapter 30

  “Wait,” said Arthur. “Say that again?”

  “The numbers Kingsley had,” I said. “They’re far from meaningless. The patterns in them—they’re Pithica’s finances. All the accounting, money laundering—”

  “Dawna told me they didn’t mean anyth—” Arthur tried to insist.

  “How complete is this information?” said Rio.

  “Staggeringly complete.” I looked back at the file, at the small rows of type, pages and pages and pages and pages—I swallowed. “Rio, their operation is so much bigger than I ever—I had no idea.”

  He didn’t comment. I had a distinct feeling he had known.

  “And economics, it drives everything.” The idea was still forming, but the solidity of the math filled me with confidence. These numbers coiled with power, ripe for exploitation. Not to mention that the icepick was beginning to thump away at the back of my skull again, and the headache only made me more certain. “The sheer amount of resources Pithica needs—if we can cut off their revenue stream…assuming we can get accurate information,” I added loudly, since it looked like Arthur was going to protest the veracity of the flash drive’s contents again, “we could cut them off at the knees.”

  “Yeah, but can’t they just ask for more money? Anyone would give it to ’em,” Arthur pointed out. “They could ask Bill Gates—”

  “Pithica operates in the shadows,” said Rio. “That must be the reason they have constructed such an elaborate diversification of resources in the first place.”

  “Yes, but it’s more than that,” I argued. “The amounts here—their yearly income is equivalent to the GDP of a small country.”

  Arthur made a face. “How could they hide all that?”

  “That’s why their resource structure is so complicated,” I said. “The money laundering, and layering, and—the number of accountants they must have had over the years to build all this, it’s staggering. It’s like looking at the code to an operating system.” Rio and Arthur both looked blank. I wished I were talking to Checker instead. “Complicated,” I clarified. “It’s very complicated. And whoever put all this together in one document was—well, a colossal idiot, but on the other hand, I don’t think Reginald Kingsley realized what he had his hands on. I bet he only knew it was something crazy and important. And it’s probably what got him killed. If he hadn’t found the drive, Pithica wouldn’t even have looked at him—their activities are too massive. They don’t sweat the small stuff; they’re too big to care about most of us.” I nodded at Rio. “You should feel complimented, I guess.”

  “But they went after Leena,” said Arthur. “And they did go after you, and me—”

  “Only after we were onto Dawna,” I reminded him. “And she only approached me because of my connection to Rio. Arthur, you and I are ants compared to this.” The scale of it gave me a dizzying vertigo, like looking up at a massive skyscraper. “But we’re in luck, in a way. Pithica is so massive and sprawling, and I think that’s why they’ve made mistakes. First, they botched Kingsley’s murder—Courtney must’ve been convenient because she was already brainwashed and in the area, but she lost track of the drive, or didn’t hand it over, or something. They should have sent someone competent, or, hell, Dawna should have gone herself, even if Kingsley seemed like a minor player. Maybe they didn’t know what was on the drive till later.”

  “If Dawna was the one, his suicide note might’ve sounded like him in the first place,” said Arthur.

  “Hell, it would have been real,” I agreed. “Courtney probably—I don’t know, threatened his wife or kid or something if he didn’t write it. Forced him somehow. But Kingsley managed to tip his wife off, and she hired you, and I doubt that was even on their radar, no offense, but then you met me—”

  “And you knew about Dawna,” finished Arthur. “Which, actually something important.”

  “But I wouldn’t have suspected her at all if it weren’t for you,” I said to Rio. “And I think that’s the second mistake they’ve made—Dawna going after Rio full-tilt, herself, because she put an enormous amount of time and resources into it, and she made a bloody mess of it. Not only did she not take out Rio as a threat, but we got out with way more information about her and Pithica than anyone’s ever had on them.”

  “And you think you can use this information,” said Rio.

  “It’s numbers,” I said, waving a hand. “I absolutely think I can. With a little help.” I picked up Arthur’s phone.

  Checker answered on the third ring. “Cas?” he said. The pause before he spoke was long enough for me to tell he really didn’t want to talk to Arthur yet.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I figured out the numbers. It’s Pithica’s financial empire.”

  He let out a low whistle. “You’re kidding.”

  Finally someone who understood what this meant. “Nope.”

  “I feel like a dead man walking just knowing that. Uh, irony not intended.”

  “Irony?”

  “I can’t walk.” Oh, right. I’d forgotten he used a wheelchair.

  Frighteningly, he did have a point. Once Pithica found out what we’d discovered, we would rocket straight to the top of the hit list. “Well, we just have to use it before they get to us,” I said.

  “How? Steal all their money?”

  “They’d just come after us and steal it back,” I pointed out. And I was pretty sure they’d win. It wasn’t a good feeling, knowing someone else could beat me.

  “What’s the plan, then?”

  “Wait a sec, I’m putting you on speaker.” I hit a button and put the phone on the table so I could talk to Rio and Arthur and him all at once. “The advantage on our side is that they’re drawing from thousands and thousands of accounts,” I said, feeling my way through the logic as I spoke. “So if we cut them off everywhere at once, they won’t be able to recover fast. They’d have to rebuild their whole infrastructure.”

  “Double-edged,” said Rio. “Such diversification also means we cannot take out their resources simultaneously. Too many targets.”

  “I don’t know. I think we can,” I said.

  “How? Bring the Fed
s in?” Arthur rubbed a palm against his chin as if he couldn’t believe he was entertaining the possibility the flash drive might contain viable information. “Could work. Feds are slick at taking down money laundering operations. You give ’em the evidence, they could bring ’em down.”

  “No, that has the same problem as stealing the money ourselves—single fail point,” I said.

  “Pithica eats criminal investigations for breakfast,” agreed Checker from the phone. “They could divert one without taking a breath. We saw that in Kingsley’s notes.”

  “It’s down to us,” I said.

  “I was afraid you were going to say that,” said Checker.

  “Chin up,” I told him. “We’re very smart.”

  “Well, yes, but—”

  “Here’s what I’m thinking instead,” I plowed on. “With this many revenue sources, they can’t have brainwashed so many people. They must be…siphoning, or running front businesses, or fake charities, or whatever else huge criminal organizations do.” I raised my eyebrows at Rio. “Right?”

  “A reasonable hypothesis.”

  “So, here’s a thought. What if we can alert everyone they’re stealing from that the money isn’t going where they think it is? Then they slam the lids on the revenue streams. And we can potentially send a hundred thousand security alerts at once with the click of a button. What do you think? Is it doable?”

  Checker took a moment to answer. Arthur was frowning and still rubbing his temple; I couldn’t read Rio any more than usual, but I got the impression he was thinking very intently. Their opinions didn’t matter, however—for sheer plausibility, I needed a computer expert’s assessment.

  “Potentially,” Checker said at last. “Pulling it off isn’t as easy as you make it sound, especially if all the different fronts funnel money to them in different ways, but maybe we can build algorithms to sort those into rough categories of attack—”

  “The sample space isn’t large on a computational level,” I reminded him.

  “True. We won’t need to worry much about efficiency or scalability. Quick and dirty will do the job; the question is whether we have enough commonality here to make ‘quick and dirty’ work.”

  “We do,” I said. I had an intuitive grasp of the math already; it was laying itself out in patterns in my brain like beautifully crafted knitwork. “I can tell we do. If you can write the code, I can do the math.”

  “Well—we can try it. But no promises.”

  His reply might not be the resounding enthusiasm I’d hoped for, but at least he’d said yes. “You’ll see. We can do this.”

  Checker cleared his throat. “Cas, pick the phone back up, please.”

  I avoided catching Arthur’s eye as I did so. I levered myself up off the bed, making a face as my wet clothes pulled against my skin and my chest wound twinged, and walked between Arthur and Rio to head over by the windows. “You’ve just got me now,” I said into the phone.

  He came straight to the point. “I can’t trust you. Or Arthur.”

  I didn’t blame him. “So we do this remotely,” I said. “So what?”

  He made a hissing sound. “It’ll go a lot faster if we’re in the same room.” He was right. I wasn’t sure what he wanted me to say, though—I couldn’t give him any guarantees, as much as I would have liked to. “And, uh, one other problem. I think I’m going to need more processor power than I took with me, and I don’t have enough cash left—I can’t make a withdrawal while Pithica’s trying to track me down, and—”

  “I got it,” I said. “Give me a shopping list. And let this be a lesson for your survival kit.”

  “Yeah,” he said fervently. “I’m not nearly as prepared for the zombie apocalypse as I should be. Although zombies would probably mean chaos and looting and massive inflation, so cash wouldn’t necessarily—”

  “Hey. Shopping list.”

  “Right. I’m emailing it to you. Uh, thanks. I’ll get you back, assuming we survive all this.”

  “Consider it payment for springing me from prison,” I said.

  “That was nothing. I had backdoors built into those systems already. Just, you know, in case. Don’t tell Arthur,” he added as an afterthought.

  “I already said I wouldn’t.” He might not be prepared for rebuilding computer clusters on the run, but Checker had some levels of paranoia I heartily approved of. I wondered what his history was. “So, what’s the verdict? You want me to dead drop the equipment?”

  “Oh, I’m sending you after way too much for that,” he said. “We might as well do this in person. This is where I take the leap, I guess.” His voice had gone high and uncertain. “How can you be sure you’re…cured?”

  I looked around the edges of the closed blinds. The traffic of Los Angeles buzzed by on the streets below, the cars splashing miserably through rain sheeting down from a soggy sky. My head still hurt, so I liked to think I was resisting something, but that was very far from a sure thing. “I’m not,” I admitted.

  I heard Checker take a few shallow breaths. Then he said, “I can’t help wondering. How do we know this isn’t part of some elaborate Xanatos Gambit?”

  I left off staring at the traffic. “Some elaborate what?”

  “Some sort of complicated scheme. I mean, how do we know this isn’t all exactly what she wants us to do?”

  It was an extremely legitimate question. “I don’t know.”

  The conversation stalled into awkward silence. I had a pretty good idea what Checker might be thinking: Dawna hadn’t found him yet. He could continue to run, and run as fast and far as he could, instead of hooking back up with us and facing the real possibility of becoming another one of Pithica’s pawns.

  “If it helps,” I said. “It feels like I’m fighting her. Plus, Rio really does seem to be immune, and he thinks I’m okay.” Checker still didn’t say anything. “Hello?”

  “Who?” The word was slow and suspicious.

  My chest started to cramp in a way that had nothing to do with the healing wound or the wet bandages, and my headache suddenly felt twice as bad. I leaned against the wall next to the window. “Arthur neglected to mention I work with Rio, didn’t he.”

  “That Rio?”

  “I assume so.”

  He made a choking sound. “Some of the things Arthur said make a lot more sense now. I’m going to kill him.”

  “I take it you’ve heard of Rio, too, then.”

  “Heard of—!” He cut himself off. I could practically hear him mentally rearranging his impression of me in light of the whole works-with-a-mass-murdering-sadist connection. I closed my eyes, heartily tired of this. “That name,” whispered Checker. “Some of the less-than-reputable people I’ve known, before I met Arthur—he terrifies them, beyond reason. It’s like he’s the boogie man. People invoke his name like he’s a demon or something. Cas Russell, I like you so far, but…”

  “I trust him,” I said, for what felt like the thousandth time.

  “To do what?”

  That was a good question. What did trust mean, exactly? “To have my back,” I said.

  “I have to think about this.”

  “He got Arthur and me out of there.”

  “He did?”

  “Yes. I told you, I trust him.” I tried for impatient, but the words just came out drained.

  “He’s after Pithica?”

  “Yes.”

  “I have to think about this,” said Checker again. “I’ll—I’ll call you back.”

  He hung up the phone and I leaned my head against the wall. The pounding of the rain reverberated through it, a steady thrum. A moment ago I’d been so hopeful. So sure we had a chance, that we could do this, but for the first time I could remember, I needed help to make it happen, and nobody wanted to jump with me. Why did everything involving people have to be so difficult?

  Rio came over. “Other plans notwithstanding, we should change location,” he said. “Tresting told me you were made.”

  “I
lost them,” I said.

  “Regardless, now that you are well enough to travel, you should leave Los Angeles. Other plans can wait. Pithica will be able to track you here eventually.”

  I’d been thinking the same thing back when we’d lost our tail after Checker’s place, but now my feelings had snapped into orneriness. “Here’s a thought,” I said. “Let them. We’ll set a trap of our own, figure out a way to fight back.”

  “Cas,” said Rio.

  Arthur joined him. “Leaving LA ain’t a bad plan, Russell. This is too big. Even if the info you think you found is legit—”

  I growled at him.

  Arthur held up his hands placatingly. “Might be a better idea for us to run anyway. From what you say, we ain’t causing a fuss, maybe they let us be.”

  Rio turned away from him slightly. “Your assistance during this has been appreciated; however, you will not be going with her. You are still compromised.”

  “Says the man who shot her!”

  “You are free to go your own way,” said Rio.

  “I can? Why, thank you so much for the permission!”

  “Cas,” said Rio, “We must move you to a more secure location immediately. Preferably outside the country.”

  “No,” I said.

  “Cas—”

  “Yeah, you just go and tell everyone what to do—” put in Arthur.

  “Cas, I cannot impress upon you the danger of—”

  “I ain’t trusting you to keep her safe!”

  “Hey!” The shout sent spikes of pain shooting through my still-damaged lungs, but I didn’t care. This was like trying to corral wet, angry cats. Rio thought Arthur useless, Arthur thought Rio an abomination, Checker didn’t trust anyone anymore, and Rio didn’t trust anyone ever, apparently me included. For crying out loud, I was the only one who wanted to be a team player, which was so laughable it pissed me right the hell off. Not to mention the ridiculous, chauvinistic chivalry that apparently came mandatory with a Y-chromosome—I was capable of wiping the floor with both Rio and Arthur at once, and they thought they had a right to dictate what I should do? No wonder I preferred to work alone.

  “I’m done with this,” I snapped, and hit the button on the phone to redial Checker, putting him on speaker again. “Okay, you three, listen up,” I said the moment he picked up. “Pithica’s come after all of us. They’ve tried to kill us, they’ve tried to brainwash us, and they’ve messed up our world in ways we probably know nothing about. Two of you have been chasing them for months; Rio, you’ve been going after them forever. I tell you I think we can finally make a difference and bring them down and you choose to give up now?”