by Kyle Mills
“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 three 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.
De Galdiano went to the closest keyboard, and after he tapped in a quick command the glass wall turned smoky. Randi took a position next to it, looking out at the hazy image of the people outside.
“Can they see in as well as I can see out?”
De Galdiano shook his head. “They’re just looking into a mirror now.”
Randi pulled two guns from beneath her coat and tossed one to Smith. They were manufactured entirely from non-metal parts and worked a little like a semiautomatic flintlock rifle. A packet of gunpowder attached to a ceramic marble was projected into the back of the barrel by a carbon-fiber spring and then touched off by a spark when the trigger was pulled.
While entirely invisible to metal detectors, the design had significant drawbacks. The clip held only five rounds and the reload time hovered around fifteen minutes.
Zellerbach slipped past the Spaniard and took a seat in front of the terminal. “Can you get me in?”
De Galdiano entered his password and a graphic of a slowly spinning globe came on screen. Zellerbach pointed to the bright pinpoints of light dotted across it. “Are those the LayerCake server farms?”
“Yes.”
“How many?”
“Hundreds.”
“No problem. No problem. I’m on it.”
De Galdiano walked across the room and sat behind the other terminal in the room. “Are you sending your Internet profile worm, Marty?”
“I’m connecting to the mainframe at my house now…Okay, it’s on its way to you.”
Zellerbach’s profile worm was an incredibly sophisticated web bot that he’d originally designed to constantly search for mentions of him on the ’net and alter the pages to portray him as a particularly attractive combination of Abraham Lincoln, Albert Einstein, and Fabio. Later, he realized that it could also be used to get revenge on the people who had tormented him in high school. In fact, Smith occasionally still searched the names of a few of his football teammates when he needed a laugh. Last time he’d looked up a guy who had once given Zellerbach a very public wedgie, the web was wall-to-wall with reports of his arrest for shoplifting a box of extra-absorbent tampons from a 7-Eleven.
“Got it,” de Galdiano said and then opened the program. A screen came up asking for the full name of the soon-to-be victim. He typed Christian Alphonse Dresner. A list of thirty-nine people by that name came up in the order of Google ranking. Not surprisingly, the man they were looking for was at the top.
“How does it work, Marty?”
Zellerbach was hammering away at his keyboard and it took a moment for him to answer. “There are a lot of different functions, but you just need the simplest. On the first screen, fill in the blank with words you want associated with him and the bot will start inserting them into web pages.”
“Okay. But what are we going to say?”
“Something that will make him unique,” Smith said.
“How about that he has a dachshund fetish?” Randi said, still gazing out the window into the cube farm beyond.
“Yeah, put that in,” Smith said. “But I doubt that’s going to make him completely unique. We need something else.”
“He tried to drown his mother in Vegemite,” Randi said.
This time they all turned to look at her.
“What? I’ve got a million of ’em.”
“Go ahead,” Smith said, feeling a surge of adrenaline twist at his stomach.
The Spaniard typed it in and then let his hand hover over the return key. “What if your suspicions about Dresner are right and this is something he’s watching for? What if this is the trigger?”
It was a risk that they’d discussed at length with Fred Klein before gettin
g the go-ahead to try this particular Hail Mary. It seemed unlikely that Dresner would tie a trigger to what was being said about him on the Internet — thousands of pages were active at any given time, portraying him as everything from the second coming to Satan. But unlikely was admittedly not the same as impossible.
“Randi,” he said, pointing to a laptop sitting on a chair made of Legos. “Get on that and pull up a live video feed.”
“What feed?”
“Anything that’s got people in it.”
She knelt in front of the keyboard and tapped in a few commands. “Okay. I’ve got a webcam in Times Square. What am I looking for?”
“People dropping dead,” Smith said, reaching out and hitting the return button. A counter started scrolling on screen as Zellerbach’s worm went to work modifying web pages with the terms they’d entered. A hundred records. A thousand. Ten thousand.
“Anything?” Smith said.
“Everybody looks okay.”
Despite the powerful air-conditioning, a drop of sweat fell from his nose and splashed on De Galdiano’s keyboard. He’d just pointed a gun at the heads of a million people and clicked on an empty chamber. But he wasn’t done yet.
Unbidden, the Spaniard opened a window to LayerCake and typed “dachshund fetish drown mother vegemite.”
There were too many hits to go through individually, but a quick survey of them suggested that all related to Christian Dresner.
“It worked,” de Galdiano said. “He’s unique in the world. For now.”
“And you can access his personal search parameters?”
“They’re stored in the same place as everyone else’s.”
“Okay. Type in the changes, but don’t make them go live until I tell you to.”
Smith took a step back and reached for the Merge on his belt. He hesitated for a moment but then flipped the power switch.
Beyond the fact that his teeth were clenched tight enough that he could hear them grinding, there was nothing. Just the normal start-up counter and icons slowly populating his peripheral vision. Dresner would have no reason to expect that he would ever come online again and Smith had bet his life that he wouldn’t be watching.
“You ready, Marty?”
“It would take a year for me to properly prepare.”
“I know. But can we do enough to scare the hell out of him?”
“Oh, I’m going to put on a show. Marty Zellerbach always puts on a show.”
73
Near Vientiane
Laos
We’re following up on the cargo plane that took off from Colombia, but we haven’t been able to track it or confirm that Smith and Russell were on board,” Deuce Brennan said.
Dresner gripped the arms of his chair, feeling the pain of increasingly arthritic fingers. “So it would be fair to say you have nothing.”
“I don’t know much about Smith, sir, but I can tell you that Randi’s no amateur. If she goes to ground, she’s going to be damn hard to find.”
“Keep me informed,” Dresner said and then cut the connection.
He remained seated, looking around the nearly empty room — the white walls, the single terminal in the corner, the sliding door cutting him off from the rest of the world. What now?
It was possible that Smith and Russell had gone into hiding, correctly surmising that he was having them hunted. But it seemed unlikely. Had they informed their superiors about the hidden subsystem? About his plans? About his offer of a partnership? If so, he would expect to have been contacted — the Americans would want to negotiate the most favorable deal possible.
There was no choice now but to assume that they were going to attempt to stop him. But how? He was watching every network and power grid. Next-generation algorithms were tracking the Merge connections of every person of consequence on the planet, looking for any pattern that might suggest someone moving against him. The Internet and media were being constantly scoured for the vaguest hint that his plan had been discovered.
But there was nothing.
It would be easy to tell himself that he had planned for every eventuality, that they were acting entirely out of desperation. But Jon Smith was a more formidable opponent than that. If he was acting, he believed he had found an exploitable weakness.
Dresner activated his usage application and a set of graphs appeared in the air ahead of him. Units online were moving upward on their daily cycles and would peak in another few hours. Five and a half million people would be active at that point, approximately 1.3 million of whom were targeted by LayerCake. It wasn’t enough — he was convinced of that. But could he afford to wait? Was it possible that Smith had found some flaw that he hadn’t considered?
A quiet alarm began to sound, answering many of the questions and suspicions plaguing him. He rushed to the terminal against the wall, resenting having to use such a clumsy device, but forced to acknowledge his technology’s inability to process complex inputs.
A screen displaying Merge networks came up and showed that the military’s satellite links had all gone down simultaneously. There was little question that Smith was to blame, but why? Only about nineteen percent of America’s soldiers were served by that network — mostly young, low-level infantry who wouldn’t have been targeted by LayerCake anyway. What could he possibly hope to accomplish that would justify the risk he was taking?
The alarm varied in pitch and another window sprang to life on his monitor — this one showing some kind of virus attacking the servers in Canada. The system was rerouting traffic through excess capacity in Mexico but there was still a two percent slowdown worldwide. How could a virus have worked its way that deep into his system?
Another change in alarm pitch was accompanied by a screen showing a T-Mobile network in Southern Europe crashing, along with a number of independent Internet service providers throughout North America.
System security would be tracking the source of the disturbances and he pulled up the list, staring at it for a moment in disbelief. This wasn’t a coordinated effort by the NSA and their foreign counterparts — the entire assault was coming from two terminals in Javier de Galdiano’s office.
Dresner tried to shut them down, but found himself locked out as disturbances kept appearing all over the globe. Two cable companies went down in California, increasing the slowdown to twelve percent and disconnecting more than forty thousand users. A server farm in Kansas went offline as the power grid began pulsing beyond the capacity of its surge protectors. The temperature of a critical switch in Arizona suddenly went outside of parameters and began its shutdown sequence.
Dresner closed the windows on his monitor and brought up the videoconference software that connected him to de Galdiano. He didn’t expect it to work and was surprised when the screen was immediately filled with the image of the man’s office. In its center was Jon Smith, standing directly behind the Spaniard as he typed furiously on his keyboard. At the other terminal, working even more manically, was a bearded man whom he suspected was Martin Zellerbach. Standing at the nearly opaque glass wall was Randi Russell.
“Javier! What are you doing?”
He expected to see fear in the man’s face — some hint that he was acting under threat — but there was none in evidence when he looked up at the camera. He was doing this voluntarily.
“They told me you’re going to use my algorithm to kill people, Christian.”
“And you believed them?”
“If they’re lying then I’ve made a bad mistake and you should fire me. But they’re not lying, are they?”
A server farm in Thailand was overwhelmed but the Canadian virus had been isolated and that capacity was coming back online for a net increase in bandwidth. Worldwide, the average slowdown was hovering just under thirty percent; total users were sixteen percent below nominal levels.
“No one screws with Marty Zellerbach!” the bearded man suddenly shouted. “I once key logged the computer of God himself!”
Wild-eyed and
obviously mentally ill, Zellerbach was nonetheless one of the best hackers in the world. With Javier’s cooperation, could he really threaten the entire network?
Dresner moved to reset the servers in Thailand but found that the control system would now read out only in that language. Finally, he took a step back and used his Merge to connect to the head of the Granada campus’s security detail.
“Yes sir, Mr. Dresner,” the man said, obviously shocked to be contacted directly by the founder of the company he worked for. “What can I do for you?”
“There are people in Javier de Galdiano’s office trying to sabotage LayerCake. It appears that Javier is working with them — or perhaps even leading them. I need you to take control of those terminals at any cost.”
There was a disconcerting silence before the man responded. “I understand, sir. But the elevators have shut down and the locks on the doors leading to the stairs have frozen.”
Dresner slammed a fist down next to his keyboard. Of course Javier would have access to the computer controlling the building.
“How long?”
“We’re working on the locks now, sir. Less than five minutes to get a team to his floor.”
“Five minutes?” Dresner repeated, taking another hesitant step backward. How much more damage would the system suffer in that time?
“Do it,” he said and then shut down the connection.
When he looked at the computer screen again, Smith was staring directly at him through the camera in the ceiling.
“I’m almost there!” Zellerbach shouted, the spit flying from his mouth visible even with the marginal resolution of the image. “Once my new virus is uploaded, it’s lights-out. I guarantee you, Dresner’s never seen anything like it. No one has!”
The beginnings of a smile played at Smith’s lips. And while it was nearly imperceptible, the look in his eyes was easy to read: Victory.
There was no way to deny what was happening any longer. Dresner had to face the fact that he wouldn’t have the time necessary to change the world in the way that he’d dedicated his life to. A simple army physician had put an end to that dream. But he could still act. And he could pray that it was enough to give humanity a chance to save itself.
