72
Outside Granada
Spain
THE BUILDING’S LOBBY was far more massive than it looked from outside. Serviced by a single broad set of stairs, the sweeping glass, concrete, and steel cavern was sunk a good ten meters into the ground. An enormous chrome mobile hung from the ceiling, swaying gently over a line of metal detectors and tables that had the look of a postmodern TSA checkpoint. Security guards were scattered throughout, mostly soft-looking Spanish locals pulling an hourly wage but also three of the men de Galdiano had warned them about—foreign, muscular, and sharp-eyed as they watched the light traffic of LayerCake employees flowing in and out.
They followed de Galdiano down the stars, with Smith and Randi taking up positions to either side of Marty Zellerbach. No one seemed to have badges and Smith assumed that they were using brain wave feeds from their Merges for identification. Dresner had included that function on the military operating system but they hadn’t had time yet to delve into its obvious potential.
“I have three guests today,” de Galdiano said to a guard behind a broad desk. “None of them is using a Merge. Can I get badges?”
The man eyed them and was undoubtedly scanning their faces for an ID. LayerCake would provide him their false identities but at a very low confidence rate since those identities had only just come into existence.
Still, the normal formalities were dispensed with. The guard’s Merge uploaded their photos as well as collecting and collating the fictional information they’d planted on the web, making the customary forms and signatures redundant. In less than a minute, they had their badges.
De Galdiano went through the metal detectors first, with Randi right behind. She’d stripped herself of every piece of metal: jewelry, belt, shoes, purse. Nevertheless, Smith tensed when she stepped through. If the alarm went off, this would be over before it even started.
But there was only the sound of the piped-in music and the conversations of the people around them. As Randi began collecting her belongings on the other side, Smith pulled his powered-down Merge from his pocket and tossed it in a bin along with his wallet. A few moments later, they were all through and stepping into the elevator.
De Galdiano used a key to access the top floor and a few seconds later the doors opened onto a sea of cubicles inhabited by young programmers wearing everything from khakis and ties to pajamas. At the back, a massive office was visible through a glass wall that ran along the top of a meter-high stainless-steel band.
The Spaniard mumbled a few greetings as they waded through the cubicles, but was visibly relieved when they got inside and closed the door behind them. The office was probably twenty meters square and looked a little like the dream bedroom of a grade-schooler. There were bicycles, vintage arcade games, and even a full-sized soccer goal full of balls. Video monitors along the ceiling, two terminals, and an enormous wet bar were the only things that hinted at adulthood.
De Galdiano went to the closest keyboard, and after he tapped in a quick command the glass wall turned smoky. Randi took a position next to it, looking out at the hazy image of the people outside.
“Can they see in as well as I can see out?”
De Galdiano shook his head. “They’re just looking into a mirror now.”
Randi pulled two guns from beneath her coat and tossed one to Smith. They were manufactured entirely from non-metal parts and worked a little like a semiautomatic flintlock rifle. A packet of gunpowder attached to a ceramic marble was projected into the back of the barrel by a carbon-fiber spring and then touched off by a spark when the trigger was pulled.
While entirely invisible to metal detectors, the design had significant drawbacks. The clip held only five rounds and the reload time hovered around fifteen minutes.
Zellerbach slipped past the Spaniard and took a seat in front of the terminal. “Can you get me in?”
De Galdiano entered his password and a graphic of a slowly spinning globe came on screen. Zellerbach pointed to the bright pinpoints of light dotted across it. “Are those the LayerCake server farms?”
“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.”