“They’re my friends. Jon and Randi.”
“Why are they here?”
“Don’t worry. They know about the hack.”
De Galdiano blanched a bit at that, immediately reaching for a bag at his feet and holding it out. “You were supposed to come alone, Marty. If you want people to know about this part of your life, that’s your business. But these are your friends not mine. You had no right.”
“Don’t be mad,” Zellerbach said, pulling out an enormous clown shoe and running a hand along it as though it were a holy relic. He seemed entirely mesmerized for a moment, but then a profound sadness seemed to come over him.
“I can’t accept this.”
“What? But I saw the report on CNN. You won.”
Zellerbach shook his head. “I didn’t do it. Jon did.”
The Spaniard redirected his gaze to Smith. The wariness was apparent in his expression, but he was also clearly intrigued. “Do I know you? What name do you go by online? How did you access the system from the outside?”
“To take your questions in order: You don’t know me. I go by the name Jon. And I didn’t have to access the system from outside. I just called a friend and he told the NSA to load those screensavers.”
It didn’t take de Galdiano long to come to the most obvious conclusion: Zellerbach had sold him out. This was a sting and he was right at the center of it.
He tried to rise from his seat, but Randi grabbed his shoulder and shoved him back down. “Relax. We’re not here to expose you or arrest you. We’re here to ask for your help.”
“It’s true,” Zellerbach said, leaning conspiratorially across the table and scratching a little more at his beard. “They really are my friends. You can trust them.”
De Galdiano’s eyes flicked nervously back and forth — at them, at the square, at the sparsely populated tables. “What do you want?”
Smith nodded subtly toward Zellerbach. It would be better to let him talk.
“It’s a problem with the Merge, Javier.”
“What kind of problem?”
“You know all those weird upgrade paths?”
Smith watched him carefully, looking for any hint that would indicate he was in on Dresner’s plan. Nothing.
“Yes.”
“They’re not upgrade paths at all. They’re a hidden subsystem.”
“A hidden…” His voice faded for a moment. “To what purpose?”
“Killing people. I figured out how to trigger it and it stopped a man’s heart.”
“Impossible.”
The waitress approached and Randi spoke casually to her in Spanish. “Coffee for everyone. That’s all.”
“I wanted those chocolate churros,” Zellerbach whined as she walked away.
“Focus, Marty.”
De Galdiano tried to get up again and this time it was Smith who shoved him back into his seat.
“This is bullshit,” the trapped Spaniard said in a harsh whisper. “I don’t know who you people are but you look like you work for the American government. Two more paranoid spies who think everyone spends their days trying to think up ways to hurt you. Christian Dresner has given more to this world than anyone alive: His antibiotics are on their way to wiping out resistance worldwide, he’s massively advanced childhood education and nutrition, he’s all but cured deafness. And now he’s handed us the most transformational technology since the printing press. Is it possible that you’re just angry because you can’t control it? Or maybe you don’t like what LayerCake has to say about you and people like you.”
“What Marty’s telling you is true,” Smith said.
“Oh, right. And I’m supposed to just take the word of two government agents and a crazy man?” He glanced apologetically at Zellerbach. “No offense.”
“None taken.”
“Even if it was technologically feasible,” de Galdiano continued. “Why would Christian want to kill his own customers? He created this technology to help the people using it — to make us see things the way they are and not how our minds filter them. Beyond being psychotic, it would be counter to everything he’s trying to accomplish.”
“I have to admit that your system’s ability to make subjective judgments about people is impressive,” Smith said, deciding to adjust his approach.
“They aren’t subjective,” de Galdiano protested. “Not in the same sense as yours and mine. That’s the point — to introduce reason and logic into…” His voice faded for a moment when he realized where Smith was leading him. “You think he’s going to kill the people the system judges negatively.”
“We spoke with him,” Zellerbach said. “He admitted it. I heard.”
“Maybe it wasn’t him.” De Galdiano indicated toward Randi and Smith. “Maybe they were tricking you.”
“They’re smart, Javier. But they’re not that smart — particularly where technology is concerned. I’m telling you that Dresner purposely built a system that can kill its user. I’m guaranteeing you that. All you have to do is find the right combination of signals. I know because it took me almost two weeks to hit on it.”
The Spaniard didn’t answer immediately, his supercharged mind collating and assessing what he’d heard.
“It was you,” he said finally. “You were the one pulling processing power from all over the world. You crashed Amazon.”
“Twice,” Zellerbach admitted. “With that many possibilities, I needed a lot of processing power.”
Some of the skepticism drained from De Galdiano’s expression and was replaced with confusion. He was slowly putting the pieces together and discovering that they all fit.
“I didn’t tell you my last name, Javier. It’s Smith. Colonel Jon Smith. Do you recognize it?”
He nodded numbly. “You’re in charge of military development. But if you’re telling the truth, where is everyone else? Why haven’t you contacted my government? Why didn’t you just kidnap me? Why aren’t there black helicopters and a hundred CIA agents?”
“Because Dresner’s watching every aspect of his system. He’d have early warning of anything out of the ordinary.”
His face went blank in the same way Marty’s did when he was working on a complex problem. Smith leaned back in his chair and watched the waitress approach with a tray full of coffee cups. He smiled politely as she doled them out but de Galdiano just stared straight ahead in what looked like the early stages of catatonia.
“Christian has made odd requests over the years,” he said finally. “But he’s a brilliant and eccentric man. I didn’t think anything about them.”
“They make sense now, though, don’t they?” Randi said.
He nodded numbly. “LayerCake is much more than what the public — and even you, Colonel — sees. There’s a core that processes enormous amounts of data that the public system doesn’t have access to: credit scores, retail purchases, criminal and medical records, tax returns—”
“Data you hacked,” Zellerbach said, not bothering to hide his admiration.
De Galdiano gave a nearly imperceptible nod. “It was never meant to be used in the public results. Christian just wanted to use it as a check and balance. When we found significant discrepancies between the core and public systems, we could fix it by hand and instantly see what went wrong with our algorithm. It’s why the system is so accurate.”
“And Dresner has access to that core,” Randi said.
“He’s linked directly to it. The judgments his Merge makes aren’t based on the public data like everyone else’s. I never understood why he wanted that — it was complicated to do and the differences in results aren’t that significant.”