by Kyle Mills
“We’ve got problems and need a little of your magic.
“What kind of problems?”
“The good major sent people after us at Marty’s house. We’ve got a lot of shots fired and a police response. Two bodies in the house, one man unconscious in the tunnel below the bathroom, and at least two men still fully operational.”
“Understood. Are the three of you all right?”
“We’ll live. But we’re headed west out of DC in a stolen police cruiser.”
“What happened to the cop?”
“That’s a whole other problem. He’s in the backseat with Randi.”
67
Near Washington Circle, District of Columbia
USA
The dark computer monitor turned gray and then a hazy white as Christian Dresner moved hesitantly closer.
“Lieutenant!” he shouted, though he knew the man’s Merge would automatically adjust the volume to a conversational level. “Wake up!”
Through Deuce Brennan’s feed, he’d seen his orders carried out and Whitfield executed. But then the situation had devolved into chaos as Randi Russell attempted to attack and then collapsed for no apparent reason. Smith had fallen a moment later, followed by Brennan’s feed losing cohesiveness and then going black despite a strong network connection.
There was little doubt that Zellerbach was responsible. He’d backed away in panic, as could be expected, but then picked up something. The playback wasn’t entirely clear, but it looked like a television remote control.
Brennan’s tooth mike was active again but the sounds coming through it were badly distorted. The audio slowly sharpened, and after a few seconds was clear enough to decipher. Gunshots. And approaching sirens.
“Lieutenant!” Dresner shouted again. “Get up!”
The image on the monitor came into focus and then moved unsteadily from the blank white of the ceiling to Zellerbach’s Cray, and finally the door leading to the hallway.
“Lieutenant!”
Finally, there was a response. “I’m here. What happened?”
“It doesn’t matter. You need—”
“It was that goddamn computer geek and his half-assed security wasn’t it? He must have had gas. Where are they?”
“Where do you think they are? They’re gone!”
Brennan connected to the men outside. “Report. What’s your situation?”
“Deuce!” a voice on the other end said. “We thought we’d lost you. The targets escaped in a police cruiser and we’ve got more cops on the way. The closest are less than a minute out. The three of you need to get the hell out of there.”
“Whitfield and Eric are down.”
There was a long pause as the man processed the news of his commanding officer’s death. “There’s nothing we can do for you, Deuce. I’m not shooting a cop. Now get your ass out of there.”
“Understood.”
The image shifted again as Brennan stood and began lurching toward the front door.
“They can’t have gotten far,” Dresner said as the dim image of Zellerbach’s front yard appeared on screen. “You can still track them.”
“I can’t do anything unless I get out of here first,” he responded, barely avoiding a powerful jet of water from the property’s automated defenses.
Dresner slammed a fist into the wall next to the monitor and turned away, activating an icon in his peripheral vision that displayed the current status of Merges worldwide. Eight hours to peak usage, with just over four million people online. Twenty-four percent of those people—972,000—had been marked for elimination by LayerCake.
He pulled up the “Security Breach” tab and activated the “US Military” subheading. Immediately a massive flow chart of interconnected names came to life in front of him. Overall U.S. military usage was within expected parameters, as was usage by the military’s hierarchy. He switched to a tab labeled “Intel.” Again, everything was within normal parameters. Utilization by the general intelligence complex was nominal and the directors of the CIA, NSA, and FBI were all connected through their personal Merges. Below their individual names was a family tree confirming that their close relatives were also using at normal levels. The “Political” tab showed a similar result. Congress was within normal ranges and while Castilla still hadn’t adopted the technology, his wife was online with a headset, as was one of his children.
The data behind the “Networks” icon were equally reassuring. Internet service providers, cable companies, and phone companies showed no unusual outages.
Of course, there was no real purpose to looking at any of these numbers beyond the emotional reassurance he derived from seeing them. The moment any of the categories diverged from expected parameters, LayerCake would immediately notify him.
So either Smith hadn’t yet notified his superiors of what he’d found or he had and they were still in the process of acting on that information. Either way, Dresner could no longer deny that he was losing control of the situation. Nine hundred and seventy-two thousand people. Would it be enough?
68
Near Tysons Corner, Virginia
USA
The sun was finally up and the crush of people heading to their jobs in DC had started in the oncoming lane. Westbound, though, traffic was light and Smith kept the police cruiser moving smoothly up the road. Constant glances in the rearview mirror provided no evidence of a tail, but did that really mean anything anymore? Using an actual car to track someone suddenly seemed so archaic.
“Yes sir,” the police officer in the backseat said into his phone. “But they—”
He paused for a moment, face actually turning a bit red as Randi pressed his own gun into his ribs. Zellerbach was tilted up onto his uninjured butt cheek, head thrown back and eyes closed. The occasional moan was the only thing indicating he was still alive.
“I understand that, sir. But what I’m trying to tell you is—”
Finally, he just gave up, mumbling a submissive good-bye before severing the connection. When Smith glanced back, it looked like the top of his head was going to blow off.
“Everything smoothed over?”
“Yes,” the man said through clenched teeth.
As requested, Klein had rolled out a few minor miracles, one being that this particular carjacking would be quickly forgotten. It was hard not to sympathize with their accidental hostage, though. He’d undoubtedly expected to have a chance to give the three of them a solid beating before sending them off to rot in prison. Now it was looking like he wouldn’t even get a chance to pull out his Taser.
“There it is,” Randi said tapping the glass separating them.
Gray and a little shopworn, the Honda was exactly what he’d asked for: the most innocuous vehicle on the planet. Smith pulled in behind it and hopped out, opening the back door as Zellerbach eased out of the passenger side with exaggerated slowness.
Randi tossed the cop’s gun into the front seat and flashed him one of her award-winning smiles. “Have a nice day, Officer.”
The keys were right where they were supposed to be and Smith eased back into the road while Zellerbach tried to find a comfortable position next to him.
“I need to go to the hospital. I need medical attention.”
“I’m a doctor, Marty. In fact, I’m an army doctor. Who are you going to find at a suburban hospital that knows more about bullet wounds than me?”
“But you’re not doing anything!”
“It’s not even bleeding anymore,” Smith said, dialing Klein and putting the phone on the dash. “Just try not to think about it, okay?”
As was customary, there was only one ring before it was picked up. “Jon. Did you find the car?”
“We’re in it now, sir. And you’re on speaker with Randi and Marty in the car.”
“Understood.”
“Who is that?” Zellerbach said.
“General Davis,” Smith responded, pulling a name off the top of his head. Zellerbach didn’t know anything a
bout Covert-One, so it would be easiest to just play Klein as his commanding officer.
“What happened?” Klein started. “Did you say that Whitfield’s dead?”
“Yeah…Look, before we left, we sicced Marty on the Merge — asked him to see if he could find anything unusual. He called when we got back, saying he had.” Smith paused, trying to put their actions in the best possible light. “We went to his house to make sure everything he’d discovered was wiped off his computer. While we were in the process of doing that, Whitfield showed up with his men.”
“Uh-huh,” Klein said, his tone suggesting that he wasn’t so easily fooled, but was temporarily willing to overlook the fact that they had ignored a direct order. “And am I to understand that you killed the major?”
“No sir. But to tell that story we’re going to have to dredge up an investigation that you’ve made clear is over.”
There was a long silence before Klein spoke again. “Give me the broad overview and I’ll decide if we need to go into more detail.”
“Yes sir. One of Whitfield’s men was on Christian Dresner’s payroll.”
“Deuce Brennan,” Randi said from the backseat. The dripping hatred in her voice suggested that the man’s life span could now be measured with a stopwatch. “He shot Whitfield and another one of his men.”
“Why? What reason would Dresner have for ordering something like that?”
“To cover up the fact that he’s hidden a subsystem in the Merge that’s capable of killing its user.”
Another long pause. “You told me it was impossible for the unit to directly injure someone. Something about a lack of power as I recall.”
“That was the consensus. But it looks like the consensus was wrong.”
“I want to be perfectly clear here, Colonel. You’re telling me that, in your opinion, Christian Dresner intentionally created a mechanism to kill people.”
“Oh, it was definitely intentional,” Zellerbach chimed in, the pain from his injury fading a bit when talk turned to technology. “He went to huge lengths to hide it and to make it difficult to activate. Amazing stuff, really. The guy really is unbelievably—”
Smith ran a finger across his throat, cutting his old friend off. “Yes sir. You understand me correctly.”
“So I’m to believe that a reclusive genius who’s spent most of his career on things like childhood education, antibiotics, and helping the deaf is really bent on the mass murder of his customers?” Another pause. “Even if we accept what Eichmann told you about Dresner wanting to use the Merge to alter people’s thought patterns, the goal was fundamentally altruistic. If a drug company came up with an antidepressant that did everything he was trying to achieve, it’d get approved and half the world would be on it a year later.”
It was an incongruity that Smith had been pondering for the last hour. “But he didn’t create that, sir. He failed.”
“Your point?”
“I don’t think he wants to kill all his customers. Just some of them.”
“Do I hear a theory forming?” Randi said from the backseat.
“Think about where he came from,” Smith continued. “His parents’ time in the concentration camp. Their treatment by the Soviets. His experience in the East German orphanage. If there’s anyone alive who’s seen what powerful men are capable of, it’s Christian Dresner.”
“Go on,” Klein said.
“The Merge is what everyone talks about, but LayerCake is really the cornerstone of his system — and one of its main functions is accurately judging people. Think about the weird focus of his apps when the system was released: They were for the financial people who got rich by bringing the world’s economy down on top of the common man. They were for the increasingly corrupt and entrenched political class. And they were for the military, which keeps getting more and more efficient at killing.”
Zellerbach’s face was a mask of concentration. He was brilliant with technology but his illness made understanding the motivations of others more of a challenge. “So you’re saying he’s going to kill all the people he thinks are bad? People who make the world a worse place?”
“It makes a certain twisted sense,” Randi admitted.
“I agree,” Klein said. “And I’m going to take this to my superiors immediately. It—”
“I’m not sure that’s a good idea,” Zellerbach interrupted.
Smith looked over at him and he shrank a little, assuming he was going to be chastised again.
“Go ahead, Marty. Why not?”
“Because I guarantee that Dresner can activate that system over the network in a matter of seconds. And I also guarantee that he’ll know if you start talking to people about it.”
“Are you suggesting he can monitor people’s minds?” Klein said. “What they’re hearing and thinking?”
Zellerbach shook his head. “No. But he’d have known that there was a chance his subsystem could be found. And he’s going to be watching.”
“How?” Klein said, starting to sound a little exasperated. He wasn’t used to dealing with Zellerbach directly.
“A million different ways. He’ll look for unexplained network shutdowns. And LayerCake has those apps that evaluate news programs, right? I’ll bet my PlayStation they’re sifting everything being said about the Merge. But if it were me, I’d focus on individual people. He can see who’s online and who isn’t — that’s easy. He’ll be watching powerful people and their families. Let’s say you went straight to the president. Everyone knows he doesn’t use a Merge, but I’ll bet his wife does. And can almost guarantee that his kids do. Do you think he’s going to let them keep using it if you tell him? No way. And when LayerCake sees their usage — or other politicians’, wealthy donors’, friends’, military guys’—start to drop below what his algorithm says is normal, he’s gonna push the button.”
It didn’t take much reflection to recognize that Zellerbach was probably right. Because of his line of work, Smith was close to very few people — and even he was already considering how he could quietly get them to disconnect. If he’d had a wife and children, they’d have been his first call.
Klein’s silence suggested that he had come to the same conclusion.
“It’s actually an interesting idea,” Zellerbach continued, getting uncomfortable in the silence.
“Marty, please…”
“Think about it, Jon. It’s just a question of how you set up LayerCake’s criteria. I’m guessing that if you had Dresner’s password, you’d kill all the al-Qaeda guys pretty quick.”
“They’re murderers and terrorists,” Randi said.
“Okay. But what about Iranian physicists? They’re not murderers or terrorists. You just don’t like what they’re doing. The truth is that you don’t object to Dresner’s weapon. You just want to be the one aiming it.”
Smith knew that Zellerbach had been taking some philosophy courses online and he had to admit that he’d made strides. But this was not the time to get bogged down in an existential debate.
“How do we stop him?”
“Do we know where he is?” Randi said.
“No,” Klein responded. “We can try to locate him, but he’s always been strangely difficult to track. Now I guess we know why.”
“What would you do even if you did find him?” Zellerbach said. “Unless he’s an idiot — and he’s not — he’s got it set up to automatically trigger if he’s separated from his Merge or if it determines he’s dead.”
“Could we dart him? Keep him in an induced coma with his unit attached?” Smith said.
“I doubt it. The Merge monitors brain waves. If it were me, I’d have it set up to trigger if anything weird started going on with my head. I mean, even if you had a whole day — and I doubt you would — getting everyone on the planet to disconnect isn’t exactly realistic. It’d be like showing everyone in the world incontrovertible proof that cell phones cause cancer. Half of ’em wouldn’t listen.”
“Okay,” Randi said
. “We can’t kill him. We can’t drug him. We can’t shut down hundreds of thousands of networks all over the world at one time. And we can’t allow critical people to stop using the system. Have I missed anything?”
“That he’s going to be looking for us with the most sophisticated search engine on the planet and unlimited funds?”
“I just checked sales numbers,” Klein interjected. “There are somewhere in the neighborhood of eight million Merges on the street.”
“Jesus,” Randi said. “Even if only a quarter of those people are targeted, that’s two million people dead. Why hasn’t he done it? He knows that we’re going to try to stop him.”
Smith nodded. “I don’t know. Maybe he can’t for some reason. Maybe he’s having second thoughts. Hell, maybe he’s just waiting for peak daily usage. But whatever the reason, it at least buys us some time.”
Randi settled back into her seat. “Yeah. But time for what?”
69
Near Front Royal, Virginia
USA
I don’t want to hear that, Marty,” Smith said, easing the car off the highway and onto an empty rural road. Best to stay away from civilization to the degree possible.
“Just forget shutting down the networks, Jon. Sure, you could pull down Afghanistan, because it’s on military satellite. But you can’t take down ATT, Verizon, and every little cellular carrier in America. And even if you did, how many of those people would be near a Wi-Fi hot spot that their Merge would immediately connect to? Killing all the networks at the same time in the U.S. — let alone worldwide — isn’t technologically feasible. Believe me. If it was, someone like me would have done it. They’d be a legend forever. People would build statues to them. Write songs about—”
“What about the power grid?” Randi said, cutting him off before he could get lost in fantasies of hacker fame and fortune. With his meds back at the house, his mind was starting to loop a bit.
“No, no, no! Forget coordinated efforts. Right now LayerCake is scouring the web, emails, forums, chat rooms, and probably half the secure servers on the planet for any hint of something like this. It’s like Santa. It’s watching everything, everybody. And you want to try to coordinate thousand of people and get every one to keep his mouth shut? You’re thinking completely wrong. Not every problem can be solved with a huge hammer.”
