“Javier!” he shouted, reaching for the switch on his Merge. “Now!”
De Galdiano didn’t move and for a moment Smith thought he hadn’t heard. Then he saw the bloodstain spreading out beneath the motionless man. With a million lives at stake, he abandoned his attempt to turn off his unit and went for the keyboard. The pain intensified and spread to his chest, strangling it in a vise-like grip as he crashed down on top of the dead man. It became impossible to breathe and his right arm felt paralyzed. He reached out with his left, vision starting to swim, and let it fall on top of the blood-splattered keyboard.
75
Christian Dresner backed away from the screen depicting Smith crawling toward Javier de Galdiano, whom he clearly didn’t yet realize was dead. Zellerbach was still on the other terminal carrying out his attack on individual components of a network that extended to every corner of the world. And Randi Russell had her back pressed to a low steel wall, occasionally shooting blindly over it in what was looking more and more like what it was: a last stand.
He turned toward a blank wall and activated his Merge’s video capability, pulling up feeds from public webcams all over the world. They hovered in front of him bordered by two bar graphs, one in blue depicting the total number of people currently online and the other in red representing those targeted. He focused on an image of a busy street in the financial district of London, following the well-dressed people rushing along the sidewalks and the vehicles choking the street.
The confident stride of a man approaching a crosswalk faltered and Dresner watched him grimace in pain and grab his right shoulder. A woman next to him reached out a helping hand but was unable to prevent him from collapsing to his knees. She started to call for help but then fell silent when she saw that the man she was hovering over was only one of many.
Cabs continued to move through the streets, their drivers not heavily targeted by LayerCake, but a bulky Mercedes in their midst suddenly swerved and jumped the curb, scattering people Dresner’s system had determined were innocent.
He kept his breathing even, trying not to think of his failures, of Smith and Russell, of the future. The ramifications of what was happening were impossible to determine and would have to be allowed to unfold over the coming months and years.
For now, there was only this moment. A moment when people died, when children were orphaned, when industries, governments, and militaries wavered. A dangerous and solemn moment.
Another car veered toward the sidewalk but then managed to correct and roll safely to a stop. Dresner took a hesitant step forward, though the motion had no effect on the image being projected on his mind. The people lying on the concrete weren’t moving but also didn’t have the profound stillness of death. He’d watched this play out in the North Korean facility more times than he could remember and it always followed the same pattern. Something was wrong.
The red bar hovering to his right began to flicker and a moment later disappeared.
De Galdiano.
The Spaniard had full access to LayerCake and had used that access to modify the judgment criteria into something no one would match.
Dresner shut down the video feed and rushed to his terminal, but when he reached for it an intense pain in his right arm stopped him. The confusion he felt was quickly dispelled by a crushing tightness in his chest and a sudden inability to breathe.
De Galdiano hadn’t changed the Merge’s criteria to target no one, he realized. He’d changed it to target its creator.
The room began to swim around him and he reached for his Merge, fumbling the power button with a thumb quickly losing sensation. His legs gave out and he hit the floor, still clawing desperately at his unit.
The pain continued to grow and he abandoned his efforts in favor of trying to deactivate the subroutine. Unable to remain on his knees, he fell to his side, concentrating on the familiar human outline icon fading in and out of existence in his peripheral vision. The launch button he’d used only moments ago now glowed with the red letters “abort.”
It pulsed irregularly, keeping time with his dying heart for a moment, and then went black.
76
“Jon!” Randi screamed over the sound of bullets hammering the metal wall behind her.
De Galdiano was dead and Smith looked like he might be too, lying partially on top of the Spaniard with his hand on the keyboard.
A shot, louder than the rest, sounded and she threw herself forward as a round penetrated the steel and sprayed her back with shrapnel. It had just been a matter of time before security found something with enough heft to blast through the barrier, but she’d been hoping for a little more foot dragging on their part.
Randi looked at what was left of the windows on the far side of the room — not much more than a few loose shards clinging to the frame. A hot breeze blew through them, strong enough to swirl the smoke hanging in the air but not enough to dissipate the overwhelming stench of gunpowder. Zellerbach was lying on his stomach still absorbed by his keyboard, though there was little point to what he was doing anymore. Not that she saw any reason to tell him that. Better to just let him stay lost in his digital world until one of the Dresner’s storm troopers got lucky and took his head off.
She scanned right again, finding it much harder than it should have been to look at Smith. His plan had been too convoluted from the start — an ungodly Hail Mary with a thousand paths to disaster and only one path to success. But they’d been in similar jams before and somehow always managed to walk away.
Not this time.
She stared at him for too long, eyes clouding with a sensation so unfamiliar that it took a moment for her to decipher it. Tears.
Pull it together, Randi!
She forced her left brain back into gear and calculated that she had only one round remaining. Options for survival were limited — but limited wasn’t the same thing as nonexistent.
First order of business was to get Smith’s gun — he still had a full clip. With his body stacked on top of de Galdiano’s they would make a functional shield that she could drag along with her to the shattered windows. The building’s facade was too featureless to climb, but it was possible she could shoot out the windows of the floor below and swing down.
Even if all that worked, her chances of getting out of the building alive were still slim. At least it would be a running fight, though. A hell of a lot better than lying around waiting to catch a bullet.
She felt uncharacteristically sluggish as she moved forward. It was easy to ignore the burning wounds in her back, but ignoring the image of Smith lying so still in front of her was less so. She’d lost friends and team members before. Why did this feel so different?
The steel behind her took another hit from the big-caliber weapon security had found and a pile of soccer balls in front of her burst and scattered around the room. The sudden chaotic motion created the illusion of Smith’s head moving. Or maybe it wasn’t the soccer balls at all — maybe she was just seeing what she wanted to see. Randi blinked hard, trying to clear her vision. Her mind wasn’t normally prone to playing tricks and now wasn’t the time for it to start.
But then his chest suddenly expanded and he rolled off de Galdiano onto the blood-soaked carpet. She froze, staring at him for a moment before looking up at the one surviving monitor bolted near the ceiling. It took a moment to make sense of the image made hazy by the smoke, but finally she managed to combine the shapes and colors into something coherent: Christian Dresner facedown on the floor.