There was an explosion of white light, and suddenly he was looking up at the sky, unable to account for what had happened. He was choking the guy, killing him, and then…
His head throbbed. Someone… someone must have pistol-whipped him from behind. He looked over at the van. The Asian guy was shoving Sarah back inside. And Hort… Hort was holding Alex by the hair, a gun at his temple.
No, he thought, but the words didn't come. No.
Alex was holding a laptop. Jesus Christ, he'd brought Obsidian with him? It was over.
“Get in the van, Ben,” Hort said. “Or I'll decorate you with your brother's brains.”
Ben got to his feet and took an unsteady step toward the van. It felt like someone had planted a vibrating chisel in the back of his skull.
“It's all right,” Alex said. “I brought them what they wanted.”
“Alex,” Ben said, and stopped. He didn't know what to say. They were all dead.
This time they cuffed Ben to Sarah. His wrists were bleeding. “That was a hell of an effort,” he said to her, because he wanted her to have something to feel good about in whatever time they had left. “For a lawyer.” But she might as well have not even heard. He wanted to say something to Alex, too, but what could he? Alex had delivered Obsidian on a platter. It was game over.
They drove off. The guy Ben had kicked in the back was groaning as if someone had put thumbscrews on him, and the guy Ben had tried to strangle was coughing so much it sounded like he was going to bring up lung tissue. Whatever damage he'd done them, he hoped it was permanent.
Hort turned in the seat and pointed a pistol at Ben. “All right, son,” he said to Alex. “Nice and simple. I want you to turn off that dead man's switch you set up.”
Dead man's switch. What had Alex done, set up some kind of dissemination program that only he could stop? Christ, all he'd done was guarantee he'd be tortured before he was killed.
“I need an Internet connection,” Alex said.
“Alex, don't,” Ben said. “They'll kill us all the second you-”
“I'll kill you all if he doesn't,” Hort said evenly. “Like I said, Ben, I didn't want it to be this way. But the mission comes first.”
“Drive into Mountain View,” Alex said. “Google has the whole town covered in Wi-Fi.”
Ben grimaced. “Goddamn it, Alex-”
“Ben, I know what I'm doing.”
“No more talk,” Hort said.
Ben closed his eyes. His head was throbbing, his wrists ached, and they were one hundred percent out of options.
They drove in silence. Ben tried to focus on the pain, because what he felt in his body was infinitely easier than what was going on in his mind. He'd been a fool. Everything he'd believed about there not being rules… but that was to prevail against the other side. Well, this was the way it worked. Hort was just more ruthless. Which was why he was holding the gun while Ben was wearing the handcuffs. Why Hort was going to walk away, while the three of them would be dumped in some shallow grave. He'd always thought of himself as a realist, prided himself on it. And now, in his last minutes on earth, he'd been exposed, forced to confront the truth. Which was that he was nothing but a stupid, naïve dipshit, and the real realists had run rings around him and were now about to take away everything.
When they reached Shoreline Road in Mountain View, Alex opened the laptop. “Okay,” he said. “I've got a connection.”
They pulled onto a side street and stopped.
“Do it,” Hort said. “And show me that it's done.”
“It's already done,” Alex said.
Hort frowned. “What do you mean it's already done? You told me you had to decrypt it, put in a passcode to stop a dissemination sequence.”
“I only said that because I was afraid you'd hurt Ben or Sarah before I could show you what I'd really done.”
Hort's expression was so steady it might have been frozen. “You did something else, didn't you?”
Alex nodded. For one crazy second, he looked like the little know-it-all he'd been as a kid. Ben felt a ridiculous surge of hope.
Hort swung the gun so that the muzzle was pointed at Alex's face. Ben's breath caught.
“What?” Hort said. “What did you do?”
Alex extended the laptop. “Here. You can see for yourself.”
Hort ignored it. The gun didn't waver. He looked at Alex with machine eyes and Ben was so sure he was going to fire he couldn't breathe.
Then Hort lowered the gun. He took the laptop and watched the screen wordlessly for a moment.
“What is this?” he said. “StatCounter? I don't understand.”
“Oh, that's just a Web site that tracks downloads and site traffic,” Alex said. He leaned forward and pointed to the screen. “Look, you can see here how many people have downloaded the program from Source-Forge. And here, that's Slashdot-wow, a hundred downloads in a half hour, that's pretty exciting. I also sent it to McAfee and Norton.”
The pounding in Ben's head was so bad he could feel it in his stomach, too. He didn't know whether to laugh or cry or puke. Maybe all three.
Hort was clenching his jaw so tightly the muscles in his cheeks stood out like marbles. “Oh, you poor dumb son of a bitch,” he said, shaking his head, his eyes glued to the screen. “You have no idea what you just did.”
“I know what I did.”
“You just unleashed anarchy, son. Anarchy. America is the most networked country on earth. This thing is going to go around like a virus, and no one is more vulnerable to it than we are.”
“No, you don't get it. I didn't just post the executable. I posted the source code, too.”
“We had all the-”
“No, you didn't. Hilzoy hid another copy. Hid it in plain sight, in a copy of a song he liked on a public file-sharing site. It took me a little while to find the right file-it was only a little bigger than the rest of them. But it was there. I decrypted it with Obsidian and now everyone has their own copy.”
“Then we're fucked. You fucked our whole country.”
“I'm not saying there won't be a few disruptions. But you know what? Right now, in a thousand basements and garages, more pimply-faced hackers and hobbyists than you can count are ripping this thing apart. Some will be trying to find out how to exploit it, yeah. Others will come up with ways to defend against it. The network is like an organism. The people are its T cells. You can't stop something like this, no matter how many people you kill. It's bits. It's information. And-”
“And information wants to be free,” Sarah said.
“Anyway,” Alex said, “the anarchy thing is only part of it. Or maybe it isn't part of it at all.”
Hort watched him. “What do you mean?”
“According to your inside man, Osborne, the NSC wasn't interested in Obsidian because it could disrupt networks. They wanted it for a domestic spying program.”
“Osborne told you this?”
“Ask him yourself.”
There was a long pause. Hort's expression was grim. He said, “I believe I will.”
Ben said, “They used you, Hort. They duped you. How do you like the taste?” It wasn't rational, but it made him feel a tiny bit better to know someone had fucked Hort the way Hort had fucked him.
Hort looked at the screen again. He shook his head slowly.
“Look at that,” Alex said. “Another twenty downloads just since we've been talking. This is getting some buzz now. It's picking up speed.”
“Genie's out of the bottle,” Ben said. “Go back to Washington and tell them they can't get it back in. Tell them you did all this for nothing, you piece of shit.”
Hort blew out a long breath. He closed the laptop and looked at Alex, then at Ben, then at Sarah.
“This op is over,” he said. “The mission failed. I failed.”
He glanced at one of the men in back. “Uncuff them. Let them go.”
The man said, “But-”
“Do it.”
The man hesitated, then leaned over and unlocked the cuffs. He inclined his head to Ben's ear. “This isn't over, asshole,” he rasped.