“What did Fred say?” she asked.
Smith had spoken with him on the way to South America, keeping his end of the conversation necessarily opaque due to Zellerbach.
“He talked to the president.”
Randi winced. “Shit. I knew it. It’s a bad call, Jon.”
There was no denying that it was a risk. Klein wasn’t willing to go completely off the books with this many lives at stake, though, and he’d been fairly certain he could convince the president that the risk to his family was limited.
“Yeah, but for now at least, Castilla’s solid. And with the White House behind him, Fred has free rein to look into ways to mitigate the effect of Dresner pulling the trigger. They’re using an anti-terrorism study on the vulnerabilities of the power grid to see how fast they could take it down. There’s a chance that we could put most of the major cities on the East Coast in the dark over the course of a few seconds. And at the same time, we could pull the plug on the military networks.”
“How much would that cut casualties?”
“Maybe thirty percent in the U.S.”
“But everyone else in the world gets hammered.”
“Yeah.”
“And when they figure out that we knew and didn’t warn them, how’s that going to go over?”
Of course, she was right. But there was just no way to get the word out with Dresner watching. All it would take was one insignificant slip.
“That’s not all they’re looking at, Randi. Nothing’s off the table.”
“Including taking Dresner up on his offer to make a deal?”
It was an interesting question. Klein was strongly against it, but Castilla wasn’t a spy, he was a politician.
“Probably, but there’s no point in worrying about it. If they cut a backroom deal and we get called off this, then at least the pressure’s off.”
She nodded knowingly. If their plan went south — and it probably would — more than a million people could die.
They hit a thick layer of clouds and Randi turned her attention to climbing above them. When they were back out into the sunshine, she glanced over at him. “What if Castilla does make a deal? What if five years go by and suddenly twenty million just drop dead. Would you rebuild?”
“What do you mean?”
“The military. Fire back up the carrier groups and the tanks and the infantry. Sometimes, I think it all feels like a throwback to a different time. Now it’s all about nukes and people who are willing to fight guerrilla wars for the next ten generations. But we’ve got all that stuff and we’re used to it, so we perpetuate it.”
“I don’t know what I’d do,” he said honestly. “What about you? The CIA completely missed the fall of the Soviet Union, the Arab Spring, and just about everything else that’s happened in the world. Are you sure you’re worth the money we spend on you?”
“Maybe not,” she admitted. “What if the agency had never existed? Would the Soviets have invaded? Would al-Qaeda have destroyed us? I mean, I think we do a lot of good but if we had a clean slate, I’m not sure I’d set up the world the same way.”
Smith leaned his head back and managed an exhausted smile. “What would you and I do in a world full of peaceful happy people?”
“God,” she said, actually shuddering. “Can you imagine? Everyone smiling and helping each other out? I’d have to—”
“Jon!” Zellerbach shouted from the back, cutting her off. “Jon! Come quick! Hurry!”
Smith leapt from his seat and ran back to where his friend was gesticulating wildly toward his computer. “What is it, Marty? Are you okay?”
“I’m a legend!” he said. “A god! And I didn’t have to do anything!”
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
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.