“I suppose that’s true.”
More coffee. The second caffeine rush wasn’t as good as the first, which she remembered hearing, caffeine adaptation was faster than with coffium’s cocktail of neuroticklers. You had to keep upping the dose to get to the same place, or wait out tedious refractory periods before you could recapture the rush.
“People swinging from lampposts, huh?”
“Twice. I didn’t put them there.”
“Who did?”
“People like me, to tell the truth. People working for rich people, taking money under orders, to send a message.”
“What kind of message?”
“Don’t fuck with my boss or you’ll hang from a lamppost.”
“But you never hung anyone from a lamppost.”
“Never hung anyone from anything. That’s not my kind of work. I’ve been asked to do it.”
“You get to say no to that kind of boss?”
“I’m good at my job. I get to say, ‘Let me explain to you why this will make things worse. Let me explain how this will make people who don’t think you’re the enemy decide they have to kill you before you kill them. Let me explain what I can do to neutralize people who want to harm you.’”
“You mean, infiltrate their networks, kidnap them—”
“Yes-no. Map the social graph, find the leaders, dox them, discredit them. Kidnap if you have to, but that makes martyrs, so not so much. Better to make them busy with fighting fires. I know other contractors who’ll crawl a culture’s chat-channels and boards and model the weak points, find the old fights that still simmer, create strategy for flaring them. So easy to infiltrate. Once they think they’re infiltrated, they point at one another, wondering who is a mole and who is true. It’s neater than bodies swinging from lampposts. Tidier. Not so many flies.”
“Ha ha.”
“You don’t like it. I work for your enemies, destroy what you’re building.” She shrugged. “I don’t do it because I hate you. Sometimes I admire you, even. But I’m good at my job. If you want to succeed, you have to be good at your job. Someone else would do my job if I didn’t, so unless you’re better at your job than people like me are at ours, you’re doomed anyway.”
The infographic pulsed red. “I fucking hate that thing.”
“I don’t mind that you’re upset. I’m saying upsetting things. If I was you, I’d be upset. I understand you don’t do what you do for job, but for love. You want to save the world. Saving the world is good, but I don’t think you will manage. I don’t think anyone can. Human nature. If the world is doomed, I want to be comfortable until it goes up, boom.”
“It sounds like you’re saying you’re interested in my trust fund.”
“I am very interested in your trust fund, Natalie. Iceweasel. I believe there are structural challenges to getting my hands on it, but I also think there are people in my orbit who know how to make structural challenges go away. They will need paying, of course, but—”
“But you’ll be able to afford it.”
“I can afford it now. I am good at my job. I get well paid. My contacts would do it for commission, but that would be much more. I prefer to pay cash, even if that risks my money.”
She poured herself more coffee, brought it to her lips, didn’t drink, looked over the black mirror of its surface. Her hand was rock steady, her eyes cool as glacial ice. “You know I can find you. No matter where you go, what you do, I can find you.”
“I know you can.” I know you think you can.
“You may think, ‘My comrades have better opsec than this Russian muscle-head, see how they cut through the network perimeter, got inside her decision loop.’ You may think, ‘We can outsmart her now.’ Is that what you think?”
Red, red, red. Stupid infographic. “I don’t think that, but I wonder if it’s true.”
She sipped, put down the cup. “It might be true. I don’t think so. Defense is a harder game than offense. Defense, you have to be perfect. Offense, you just need to find one imperfection. Here I am defender. When I hunt you, you are the defender. You will make mistakes. Your philosophy isn’t about perfect, it’s not about discipline.”
It takes mental discipline not to delude yourself.
“It doesn’t matter. If you understand anything about me, you understand I don’t give a shit about money. If I could put it in a pile and set fire to it, that’d be the only day I wouldn’t piss on it. I’m not going to outsmart you. If nothing else, having no money and none coming would alienate my father so deeply that he might stop trying to induct me into his cult of a family. Maybe he’ll adopt you.”
“I don’t think I’d let him.” Her microexpression was impossible to read. “I’m going to talk to the kind of people who do things with trusts and finances, so your father couldn’t undo them. You know if I say no, and you talk to your father about this, I can make your situation worse, in significant ways. You know I was able to track you, to solve your patterns. I took you without fuss. We know you don’t care for these people, but we also both know certain other people matter to you, such as your Gretyl—” The name made the infographics lose their shit. “I can find her as easily as I found you. The fact you were not hurt was a choice on my part. Do you understand these things?”
She was crying, and just hating herself for it. So foolish! To give this person such leverage over her, to be such a Pavlovian slave, just mention Gretyl’s name and the waterworks started.
She snuffled snot, savagely wiped her eyes, glared. The merc looked a little embarrassed.
“I don’t like to threaten. But it helps if you know I’m serious. That way we don’t have misunderstandings about balance of power. I am someone who pays attention to the balance of power. It’s my professional competence.”
“If you know anything about me, you know I just want to get the fuck out. I have no urge to screw up your job with my sociopathic family. If you think about it for one fucking second, Ms. Balance of Power, you’d understand I don’t play games. I voluntarily told you I had pwned the network. I could have kept that a secret forever. I voluntarily handed over that power.”
“Of course, you’ve left me wondering what other secrets you have, which is why we’re having this discussion.”
“I don’t have any more secrets.” Oh, that fucking infographic.
She laughed. She was pretty when she laughed. Not scary at all. It was like the teenaged girl trapped inside her—before all the crazy-ass martial arts and BFG training—was shining through. “Of course you have secrets. We all have secrets, Iceweasel.”