Smith looked down at the photo of a strategically pixilated naked man accompanying a report on CNN’s homepage. The text beneath it told the story of an unknown hacker accessing the NSA computers and putting similar pictures on all the screensavers.
Once again, Fred Klein had come through.
71
Granada
Spain
SMITH SLOWED HIS PACE AGAIN, listening to Marty Zellerbach huffing loudly as he crept up the endless set of stairs. Below, the ancient city of Granada stretched into the distance. He kept a watchful eye on the windows in the whitewashed stone buildings on either side of the steps and did his best to turn his face away from the occasional passing pedestrian. So far, things seemed to be going smoothly, but that could all be an illusion. They wouldn’t know they’d been identified until the bullets started flying.
Zellerbach limped up to him, still milking his bullet scrapes, and then stopped in the shade of a fruit tree. The early-afternoon sun had pushed temperatures into the eighties and the forecast was promising another five degrees before sunset.
“You all right, Marty?”
He squinted through the green contacts Randi had spent ten minutes getting into his eyes and scratched like a flea-ridden dog at the fake beard covering much of his face. Combined with the sweat-soaked dress shirt and high-water pants, the disguise gave him a bit of a deranged air.
Not that Smith looked much better. The baseball hat covering his hair had been padded in a way that made his head appear abnormally large and cotton stuffed into his cheeks caused them to bulge noticeably.
An often-ignored fact was that LayerCake constantly attempted to identify people in order to hone its facial recognition software. And while Dresner had been clear that the data collected was immediately purged, it seemed likely that he had the ability to use it for his own purposes. In all likelihood, every Merge on the planet was attempting to find their faces and send a GPS coordinate to their master.
Randi, already at the top of the hill, had gone with her old standby: Muslim. She wore a full headscarf, reflective sunglasses, and a long coat that gave the impression of thirty extra pounds—a configuration that he knew from his own testing confounded the system every time.
“Not much farther, Marty. Five more minutes and we’re there.”
The hacker scowled and gave his beard a few more scratches, but then started forward again. His trophy awaited.
They caught up to Randi on an empty cobblestone street and crossed over to a square lined with outdoor cafés. It was barely noon, so there were only a few scattered customers drinking coffee, reading magazines, and fawning over dogs they were taking a break from walking.
The restaurant they were looking for ran along the back of the square and was the least inhabited. Only three chairs were taken—two by a young couple who could see only each other and the last by a thin, thirty-something man with shaggy black hair and clothes that seemed to have been pulled randomly from his laundry hamper.
“That’s him. That’s Javier,” Zellerbach said. Randi immediately turned right, leading them on a circuitous route that would allow them to come up behind the Spaniard.
Not surprisingly, there was a Merge hanging on his belt. She deftly flipped the power switch before the three of them dropped into chairs around him.
“Eh!” he said, reaching behind him to turn it back on.
Smith grabbed his wrist. “We’re going to leave that off for a little while, okay?”
De Galdiano used the near-perfect English he’d learned before dropping out of MIT. “Who the hell are you?”
Smith didn’t answer but Zellerbach waved a hand manically to get the Spaniard’s attention. “Javier! It’s me!”
“Marty?” he said, trying to see through the beard and contacts.
“In all my luminous magnificence.”
“Who are these people? Why did you bring them here?”
De Galdiano’s tone had a nervous edge that wasn’t surprising. He had a family, an incredibly high-paying job, and a respectable position in European society. The press and authorities thought he’d left his hacker life behind long ago, and being linked to a group competing to break into the NSA mainframe wouldn’t exactly fit that image.
“They’re my friends. Jon and Randi.”
“Why are they here?”
“Don’t worry. They know about the hack.”
De Galdiano blanched a bit at that, immediately reaching for a bag at his feet and holding it out. “You were supposed to come alone, Marty. If you want people to know about this part of your life, that’s your business. But these are your friends not mine. You had no right.”
“Don’t be mad,” Zellerbach said, pulling out an enormous clown shoe and running a hand along it as though it were a holy relic. He seemed entirely mesmerized for a moment, but then a profound sadness seemed to come over him.
“I can’t accept this.”
“What? But I saw the report on CNN. You won.”
Zellerbach shook his head. “I didn’t do it. Jon did.”
The Spaniard redirected his gaze to Smith. The wariness was apparent in his expression, but he was also clearly intrigued. “Do I know you? What name do you go by online? How did you access the system from the outside?”
“To take your questions in order: You don’t know me. I go by the name Jon. And I didn’t have to access the system from outside. I just called a friend and he told the NSA to load those screensavers.”
It didn’t take de Galdiano long to come to the most obvious conclusion: Zellerbach had sold him out. This was a sting and he was right at the center of it.
He tried to rise from his seat, but Randi grabbed his shoulder and shoved him back down. “Relax. We’re not here to expose you or arrest you. We’re here to ask for your help.”
“It’s true,” Zellerbach said, leaning conspiratorially across the table and scratching a little more at his beard. “They really are my friends. You can trust them.”
De Galdiano’s eyes flicked nervously back and forth—at them, at the square, at the sparsely populated tables. “What do you want?”
Smith nodded subtly toward Zellerbach. It would be better to let him talk.
“It’s a problem with the Merge, Javier.”
“What kind of problem?”
“You know all those weird upgrade paths?”
Smith watched him carefully, looking for any hint that would indicate he was in on Dresner’s plan. Nothing.
“Yes.”
“They’re not upgrade paths at all. They’re a hidden subsystem.”
“A hidden…” His voice faded for a moment. “To what purpose?”
“Killing people. I figured out how to trigger it and it stopped a man’s heart.”
“Impossible.”
The waitress approached and Randi spoke casually to her in Spanish. “Coffee for everyone. That’s all.”
“I wanted those chocolate churros,” Zellerbach whined as she walked away.
“Focus, Marty.”
De Galdiano tried to get up again and this time it was Smith who shoved him back into his seat.
“This is bullshit,” the trapped Spaniard said in a harsh whisper. “I don’t know who you people are but you look like you work for the American government. Two more paranoid spies who think everyone spends their days trying to think up ways to hurt you. Christian Dresner has given more to this world than anyone alive: His antibiotics are on their way to wiping out resistance worldwide, he’s massively advanced childhood education and nutrition, he’s all but cured deafness. And now he’s handed us the most transformational technology since the printing press. Is it possible that you’re just angry because you can’t control it? Or maybe you don’t like what LayerCake has to say about you and people like you.”
“What Marty’s telling you is true,” Smith said.
“Oh, right. And I’m supposed to just take the word of two government agents and a crazy man?” He glanced apologetically at Zellerbach
. “No offense.”
“None taken.”
“Even if it was technologically feasible,” de Galdiano continued. “Why would Christian want to kill his own customers? He created this technology to help the people using it—to make us see things the way they are and not how our minds filter them. Beyond being psychotic, it would be counter to everything he’s trying to accomplish.”
“I have to admit that your system’s ability to make subjective judgments about people is impressive,” Smith said, deciding to adjust his approach.
“They aren’t subjective,” de Galdiano protested. “Not in the same sense as yours and mine. That’s the point—to introduce reason and logic into…” His voice faded for a moment when he realized where Smith was leading him. “You think he’s going to kill the people the system judges negatively.”
“We spoke with him,” Zellerbach said. “He admitted it. I heard.”
“Maybe it wasn’t him.” De Galdiano indicated toward Randi and Smith. “Maybe they were tricking you.”
“They’re smart, Javier. But they’re not that smart—particularly where technology is concerned. I’m telling you that Dresner purposely built a system that can kill its user. I’m guaranteeing you that. All you have to do is find the right combination of signals. I know because it took me almost two weeks to hit on it.”
The Spaniard didn’t answer immediately, his supercharged mind collating and assessing what he’d heard.
“It was you,” he said finally. “You were the one pulling processing power from all over the world. You crashed Amazon.”
“Twice,” Zellerbach admitted. “With that many possibilities, I needed a lot of processing power.”
Some of the skepticism drained from De Galdiano’s expression and was replaced with confusion. He was slowly putting the pieces together and discovering that they all fit.
“I didn’t tell you my last name, Javier. It’s Smith. Colonel Jon Smith. Do you recognize it?”
He nodded numbly. “You’re in charge of military development. But if you’re telling the truth, where is everyone else? Why haven’t you contacted my government? Why didn’t you just kidnap me? Why aren’t there black helicopters and a hundred CIA agents?”
“Because Dresner’s watching every aspect of his system. He’d have early warning of anything out of the ordinary.”
His face went blank in the same way Marty’s did when he was working on a complex problem. Smith leaned back in his chair and watched the waitress approach with a tray full of coffee cups. He smiled politely as she doled them out but de Galdiano just stared straight ahead in what looked like the early stages of catatonia.
“Christian has made odd requests over the years,” he said finally. “But he’s a brilliant and eccentric man. I didn’t think anything about them.”
“They make sense now, though, don’t they?” Randi said.
He nodded numbly. “LayerCake is much more than what the public—and even you, Colonel—sees. There’s a core that processes enormous amounts of data that the public system doesn’t have access to: credit scores, retail purchases, criminal and medical records, tax returns—”
“Data you hacked,” Zellerbach said, not bothering to hide his admiration.
De Galdiano gave a nearly imperceptible nod. “It was never meant to be used in the public results. Christian just wanted to use it as a check and balance. When we found significant discrepancies between the core and public systems, we could fix it by hand and instantly see what went wrong with our algorithm. It’s why the system is so accurate.”
“And Dresner has access to that core,” Randi said.
“He’s linked directly to it. The judgments his Merge makes aren’t based on the public data like everyone else’s. I never understood why he wanted that—it was complicated to do and the differences in results aren’t that significant.”
“Unless the decision you’re making is life or death,” Smith said.
“Yes,” he responded quietly. “Unless it’s life or death.”
“Then you’ll you help us?” Zellerbach said.
De Galdiano met his eye. “Help you do what?”
“Stop him.”
Despite everything, he seemed a little startled by the suggestion. “I’ve worked for Christian since I was in my twenties. I’d probably be in jail if it weren’t for him and he’s always been good to me and my family…”
“Look,” Smith said. “What if we’re lying to you? Hell, what if Marty has a bet with someone for another clown shoe and all this is just a big con. What’s the worst that can happen? We shut down LayerCake and everyone has to go back to using Google for a few hours. You get fired and retire on the fortune you already have in the bank.”
“And what about the best-case scenario?” Randi added. “That you save the lives of a million people.”
De Galdiano didn’t speak again for a long time. “What is it you want from me exactly?”
“Well, we have a few ideas,” Smith said. “But the truth is, you’re the expert. Is there any way to centrally deactivate every Merge in one shot?”
“No.”
“What about a virus?”
“Impossible. You can’t run so much as a single line of code on the Merge unless Christian personally approves it. And he’s not going to approve a virus.”
Depressing, but not unexpected. It was exactly what Zellerbach had told them.
“What about Dresner?” Randi said. “Can you help us get to him?”
“Personally? No. I can count the number of times I’ve met with him face-to-face on one hand—and he initiated all those meetings. We communicate entirely by email and videoconference.”
Zellerbach had called that one too, but it had been worth asking.
“So what you’re saying is that all we have to play with is LayerCake.”
De Galdiano nodded. “I have root access to that system only. And even then, only from the terminal in my office.”
Smith glanced at Zellerbach who gave a subtle thumbs-up indicating that the Spaniard’s words rang true.
“Can you take down the system from there?”
“No. It’s too diffuse. We have redundant processing centers all over the world. I set it up specifically to prevent someone from doing what you’re asking. And if you’re right about Christian watching, he would see it happening. This isn’t like pulling the plug out of your PC.”
“Okay,” Smith said. “But you have access to the algorithms that LayerCake uses to make its judgments.”
“Of course,” de Galdiano said, starting to look a bit ill as he wrapped his mind around what was happening. “I wrote them.”
“What about Dresner’s judgments?”
“Christian uses data from the core but otherwise he’s on the same system as everyone else. Obviously, it’s customized to his values just like yours is customized to yours. What are you getting at? Do you have a plan?”
“Maybe,” Smith said. “Can you get us into your office?”
“Security is heavy. That’s something else that’s always been strange. We’re not talking about the normal…What do you call them? Rent-a-cops? These are very scary men with big guns.”
“You must have people in and out of there,” Randi said. “Consultants, reporters…”
“I can get you visitor badges. But after that, I can’t guarantee anything. When I triggered the metal detector last year, I was one set of car keys away from getting a cavity search. And I run the place.”
72
Outside Granada
Spain
THE BUILDING’S LOBBY was far more massive than it looked from outside. Serviced by a single broad set of stairs, the sweeping glass, concrete, and steel cavern was sunk a good ten meters into the ground. An enormous chrome mobile hung from the ceiling, swaying gently over a line of metal detectors and tables that had the look of a postmodern TSA checkpoint. Security guards were scattered throughout, mostly soft-looking Spanish locals pulling an hourly wage but also th
ree of the men de Galdiano had warned them about—foreign, muscular, and sharp-eyed as they watched the light traffic of LayerCake employees flowing in and out.
They followed de Galdiano down the stars, with Smith and Randi taking up positions to either side of Marty Zellerbach. No one seemed to have badges and Smith assumed that they were using brain wave feeds from their Merges for identification. Dresner had included that function on the military operating system but they hadn’t had time yet to delve into its obvious potential.
“I have three guests today,” de Galdiano said to a guard behind a broad desk. “None of them is using a Merge. Can I get badges?”
The man eyed them and was undoubtedly scanning their faces for an ID. LayerCake would provide him their false identities but at a very low confidence rate since those identities had only just come into existence.
Still, the normal formalities were dispensed with. The guard’s Merge uploaded their photos as well as collecting and collating the fictional information they’d planted on the web, making the customary forms and signatures redundant. In less than a minute, they had their badges.
De Galdiano went through the metal detectors first, with Randi right behind. She’d stripped herself of every piece of metal: jewelry, belt, shoes, purse. Nevertheless, Smith tensed when she stepped through. If the alarm went off, this would be over before it even started.
But there was only the sound of the piped-in music and the conversations of the people around them. As Randi began collecting her belongings on the other side, Smith pulled his powered-down Merge from his pocket and tossed it in a bin along with his wallet. A few moments later, they were all through and stepping into the elevator.
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.
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