67
Near Washington Circle, District of Columbia
USA
THE DARK COMPUTER MONITOR turned gray and then a hazy white as Christian Dresner moved hesitantly closer.
“Lieutenant!” he shouted, though he knew the man’s Merge would automatically adjust the volume to a conversational level. “Wake up!”
Through Deuce Brennan’s feed, he’d seen his orders carried out and Whitfield executed. But then the situation had devolved into chaos as Randi Russell attempted to attack and then collapsed for no apparent reason. Smith had fallen a moment later, followed by Brennan’s feed losing cohesiveness and then going black despite a strong network connection.
There was little doubt that Zellerbach was responsible. He’d backed away in panic, as could be expected, but then picked up something. The playback wasn’t entirely clear, but it looked like a television remote control.
Brennan’s tooth mike was active again but the sounds coming through it were badly distorted. The audio slowly sharpened, and after a few seconds was clear enough to decipher. Gunshots. And approaching sirens.
“Lieutenant!” Dresner shouted again. “Get up!”
The image on the monitor came into focus and then moved unsteadily from the blank white of the ceiling to Zellerbach’s Cray, and finally the door leading to the hallway.
“Lieutenant!”
Finally, there was a response. “I’m here. What happened?”
“It doesn’t matter. You need—”
“It was that goddamn computer geek and his half-assed security wasn’t it? He must have had gas. Where are they?”
“Where do you think they are? They’re gone!”
Brennan connected to the men outside. “Report. What’s your situation?”
“Deuce!” a voice on the other end said. “We thought we’d lost you. The targets escaped in a police cruiser and we’ve got more cops on the way. The closest are less than a minute out. The three of you need to get the hell out of there.”
“Whitfield and Eric are down.”
There was a long pause as the man processed the news of his commanding officer’s death. “There’s nothing we can do for you, Deuce. I’m not shooting a cop. Now get your ass out of there.”
“Understood.”
The image shifted again as Brennan stood and began lurching toward the front door.
“They can’t have gotten far,” Dresner said as the dim image of Zellerbach’s front yard appeared on screen. “You can still track them.”
“I can’t do anything unless I get out of here first,” he responded, barely avoiding a powerful jet of water from the property’s automated defenses.
Dresner slammed a fist into the wall next to the monitor and turned away, activating an icon in his peripheral vision that displayed the current status of Merges worldwide. Eight hours to peak usage, with just over four million people online. Twenty-four percent of those people—972,000—had been marked for elimination by LayerCake.
He pulled up the “Security Breach” tab and activated the “US Military” subheading. Immediately a massive flow chart of interconnected names came to life in front of him. Overall U.S. military usage was within expected parameters, as was usage by the military’s hierarchy. He switched to a tab labeled “Intel.” Again, everything was within normal parameters. Utilization by the general intelligence complex was nominal and the directors of the CIA, NSA, and FBI were all connected through their personal Merges. Below their individual names was a family tree confirming that their close relatives were also using at normal levels. The “Political” tab showed a similar result. Congress was within normal ranges and while Castilla still hadn’t adopted the technology, his wife was online with a headset, as was one of his children.
The data behind the “Networks” icon were equally reassuring. Internet service providers, cable companies, and phone companies showed no unusual outages.
Of course, there was no real purpose to looking at any of these numbers beyond the emotional reassurance he derived from seeing them. The moment any of the categories diverged from expected parameters, LayerCake would immediately notify him.
So either Smith hadn’t yet notified his superiors of what he’d found or he had and they were still in the process of acting on that information. Either way, Dresner could no longer deny that he was losing control of the situation. Nine hundred and seventy-two thousand people. Would it be enough?