“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 getting 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
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?