The man stopped laughing. “How do you know my name? Where the hell did you get that information?”
“. . . that your data will forever sour. Until you seek expiation.”
“You’re a fuckin’ weirdo, you know that? I want to know how you got that information. I’ll call the police.”
“I wouldn’t call the police if I were you, Bob. There’s probably a warrant out on you for unpaid parking tickets by now.”
The man’s turn at the register had come. He glared as Loki stood nearby.
“Goddamned weirdo . . .”
The man ordered his coffee and a pastry, then offered his gold card. The cashier ran it, paused, and then frowned. “I’m sorry, sir. That card was declined. Do you have another one?”
“Declined? That’s impossible.”
The people in line groaned.
“Look, here . . .” He took out another credit card and handed it to her. Then he turned to face Loki. “Listen, I’m going to call the police if you don’t get away from me.”
“But I’m a law-abiding citizen, Bob. You should be careful who you point fingers at.”
The cashier grimaced. “Uh, I’m sorry, sir. This one has also been declined, but it says that I need to confiscate it. I’m sorry.”
“What? This is ridiculous!”
“That’s what it says, sir.”
He tried to grab it back from her, but she pulled away. “Sir! The card is not your property. It’s the card company’s property.”
Wahlen turned on Loki. “You did something to me, and I’m going to phone the police.” The man stepped out of line and started dialing, but another call was already coming in. “Hello? . . .” Wahlen listened. Then frowned, whispering tersely. “No . . . no. Hold it. I don’t owe money on a boat.” He hung up.
Loki walked behind him. “Welcome to hell, Robert. . . .”
The man hurried out, Loki watching him go.
Loki suddenly noticed another darknet operative staring at him near the window—her handle marked her as Vienna_2, an eighth-level Chemist with a four-star reputation on a base of seven-thirty. “What are you lookin’ at?”
“That was cruel, Loki, to use your power like that. You’re liable to ruin that man’s life with a Data Curse. And over what—cutting in line?”
“Fuck you.”
She reached into D-Space and rated him one star.
He flipped her off. “If I gave a damn what you thought of me, I’d kill myself.”
Just then he received an alert in his HUD display, and his mood changed considerably as he read the notification. It was a pleasant surprise. He turned to Vienna_2. “My apologies, Vienna. As a matter of fact, here . . .” He rated her five stars. “For being such a civic-minded little bitch. But my day just got a lot better. If you’ll excuse me, I have to catch up with an old friend.”
Chapter 21: // Exploit
Mexican Drug Gangs Fuel Violence in Midwest—In a press conference Thursday, state police officials in several Midwestern states linked a crime wave that has claimed at least two dozen lives in recent weeks to illegal immigrants operating narcotics rings in the U.S. Police contend that heavily armed Mexican gangs are fighting it out over a shrinking market in tough economic times—with average citizens getting caught in the crossfire.
Loki had always known it would only be a matter of time before he found The Major. The darknet grew more eyes every day, and the modern world left too much data in the wake of everyday transactions. If they couldn’t find The Major by his purchasing patterns, or the communities of interest in his captured telecom data, they still might catch his likeness in facial recognition systems they were putting up on bridges and highways or—more probably—in the chance detection of him by the ever-expanding network of darknet operatives. As the real-world economy continued to sink, more and more folks were joining the darknet.
Still, The Major was harder to track down than most; he worked through proxies and surrounded himself with endless numbers of expendable contractors who knew nothing of his whereabouts. He also constantly shifted from safe house to motel to hotel, switched identities—and used top-notch encryption in his communications.
But even the most stringent security precautions suffered from a fatal weakness: the human factor. This was doubly true for busy people, and there was little doubt that The Major was busy; planning a covert military campaign in the middle of the United States in coordination with a media propaganda campaign had to require long hours. The Major was probably operating on very little sleep.
Which is why Loki wasn’t surprised when a lone credit card charge for Anson Gregory Davis appeared on merchant bank networks. It was the same alias The Major had used in Georgia. The charge was for a block of rooms at a roadside motel in Hinton, Oklahoma—about a half-hour drive outside of Oklahoma City.
Loki quickly overlaid a map of Oklahoma darknet communities with that of reported acts of violence against them. Hinton looked like an easy commute to the front lines of this covert war. It was also close to several airports. By tapping nearby darknet operatives, Loki was able to confirm out-of-the-ordinary C-130 cargo plane activity at a nearby municipal strip. The tail numbers came up empty in the FAA database. Normally, running a scan for such numbers would have sent up alarm bells; government and quasi-government agencies typically put flags on covert records, so they’d know if anyone searched for them. But the Daemon had mirrored many such databases over the past two years.
The Major wouldn’t have any idea Loki was coming.
Darkness had fallen on the Red Rock Motel just south of town. Loki sat inside his racing trailer ops center, parked in a field two miles away. He began manipulating the D-Space objects that represented the constellation of machines at his command—both in the air and on the ground.
He’d been monitoring comings and goings at the motel from several low-speed drones orbiting at ten thousand feet. Pattern tracking software had quickly identified repetitious movement—the patrolling radius of several sentries. Each of the sentries was carrying a cell phone, so tracking them now wouldn’t be a problem. He also noticed two sets of sentries sitting in vehicles near the road, watching the approaches from the north and south.
In the field outside his parked trailer, Loki arrayed two dozen razorbacks, and he now took direct control of the lead bike, bringing its camera eyes up in his HUD display. It felt like an ultra-realistic game. He slaved the other bikes to his, and then sent them down the county road at a modest speed.
Using the aerial drones to surveil the roads, he’d timed the departure of the bikes so they didn’t encounter other vehicles. When they got within a mile of the motel he switched off their engines and had them run on their electrical drive—powered by the boron/epoxy flywheel in the saddle casing. In this low-power mode, razorbacks were very quiet, although they couldn’t run like this for very long.
He sent them out into the field west of the motel. In about ten minutes they had swung around and were silently approaching through the scattered trees and grass at the edge of the motel grounds.
That’s when he sent two distant AutoM8s accelerating down the county road—one coming from the north, the other from the south. They were unmanned Dodge Charger SRT8s. With gas prices now approaching seven bucks a gallon and unemployment still rising, brand-new eight-cylinder cars were sitting on distributor lots everywhere. The Daemon was doing cheap fleet leases and insuring them against their inevitable destruction. Cars were something America had an endless quantity of.