Just before the phone call ended came the sound of a car door opening, Siyed marching to his death.
He was such a little man, Dagmar remembered. Five foot three or something. Even the average American couch potato could have given him a thrashing without breaking a sweat.
Damn actors and their egos, Dagmar thought. Siyed had thought he was a superhero and had walked right up to the man who killed him.
With adrenaline-clumsy fingers, Dagmar punched buttons on her phone and saved the voice mail. Kim turned off the transcription machine.
All the tension seemed to have drained out of the room.
“You’ll forward that to us?” Murdoch asked.
“If I can find out how to do that,” Dagmar said.
“Who’s your carrier?” Kim asked.
Dagmar told him. He wrote it down.
Murdoch’s blue eyes seemed to look at her from a hundred miles away.
“Do you have any idea,” he asked, “who this other watcher might be?”
She shook her head.
The man who was waiting to kill me, she thought. Fire licked along her nerves.
“I’ve got to leave,” she said suddenly.
But where, she thought, would she go?
She didn’t want to think about the killer who was tracking her. She decided to deal with another problem, one that Special Agent Landreth had declined to help her with.
Richard the Assassin sat quietly in his fifth-floor office, his white-noise generator hissing quietly from the window. A series of screens curved around him like a heads-up display the size of the room. The ninja action figures posed in a long glass case on top of his bookshelf.
“Yes,” he said. “I can get you Charlie’s emails, at least providing he was using his AvN Soft email address. Our email clients use IMAP protocol, not POP3. All emails are stored on the server unless they’re specifically deleted.” He glanced up. “It makes it easier for people who use different computers in different locations to get their email.”
“Charlie was in touch with people at brokerage houses,” Dagmar said. “He’d discovered that someone was using illegal copies of Rialto, and he wanted to send a patch to those copies to shut them down.”
Richard looked at her.
“That’s kind of interesting,” he said. “I heard that from one of the Great Big Idea people, and when I told some folks on the AvN Soft side, they said they hadn’t heard anything about it.”
“You’re hearing about it now,” said Dagmar.
Richard drew a finger down the side of his jaw.
“Okayyy,” he said slowly.
Dagmar reached into her jeans pocket and took out the memory stick.
“Here’s the final version of Charlie’s patch,” she said, “along with all the IP addresses that have been harvested so far. There will be more on Monday, when Tapping the Source goes into play.”
Richard took the portable memory and looked at it.
“What do you want me to do with this?” he asked.
“Copy it to a secure location,” Dagmar said, “because I think that’s what got Charlie killed.”
The white-noise generator hissed as Richard looked at the memory stick in his hand.
“Maybe,” he said, “we should find out if this thing works.”
“How?”
“We’ve got the patch. We’ve got IP addresses. Let’s send it out and see what happens.”
Dagmar considered this.
“Firewall the hell out of it,” she said, “and let’s go for a drive.”
Dagmar moved one of the office chairs so that she could watch over Richard’s shoulder. He plugged the memory stick into one of his sliver-thin state-of-the-art laptops and downloaded the patch onto a virtual drive that he created especially for the program. He made certain his firewalls were in place and then ran the program.
A window appeared on his display.
›Insert target address. ›
“Well,” Dagmar said, “the display’s a classic.”
Richard opened one of the files of addresses and typed.
›161.148.066.255
Richard hit Enter, and another prompt appeared. Richard clicked on another window, one of his firewalls, and gave permission for a message to go out.
“It sent some kind of ping,” he said.
Richard typed in another address, hit Enter, and then repeated the procedure several times.
One of the firewall windows opened.
“That first address is responding,” he said.
He gave permission for the firewall to let the message enter.
›161.148.066.255 infected. Patch sent.
“Damn,” Richard said. “We got lucky first time out.”
He had to give permission for the patch to clear the firewall. Less than a minute later, another message appeared.
›161.148.066.255 clean.
And not only was 161.148.066.255 clean, Dagmar knew, but it was now busy scrubbing other computers, spreading the patch to every machine in its network.
They had done all this, she reminded herself, without knowing where the target computer was or who it belonged to. Who any of them belonged to.
She and Richard spent the next half hour sending the patch to IP addresses on Charlie’s list. Twenty-eight percent were infected and were cleansed with Charlie’s patch.
Charlie’s plan, his demented plan, was working.
Richard pushed his chair back from the machine and rolled his shoulders.
“How many IP addresses left?”
“Thousands. Maybe hundreds of thousands-I haven’t looked.”
Richard blinked. It was one thing to test your ninja mettle against a cunning opponent; it was another to slave over a keyboard in order to type in zillions of addresses.
“Let’s call it a day’s work, shall we?” he said.
“Now you understand,” said Dagmar, “why we want millions of players to work with these IP addresses.”
He nodded.
She raised her arms and stretched, opening her chest, filling her lungs with air.
One of Richard’s other machines gave a chime. He wheeled his office chair to another part of his desk and frowned at the display.
“Someone’s trying to go through the firewall,” he said.
“Not one of the targets?”
“No. They’d be identified by IP address only. This is someone at the company.” He paused as he read the monitor, then turned to look over his shoulder at Dagmar.
“It’s you,” he said.
She looked at him in surprise.
“What do you mean? ” she asked.
“It’s someone using your account.”
She bolted out of her chair to look at the display. “Who?”
Richard shrugged. “He’s calling from off-site,” he said. He frowned at the screen for a moment. “We could let him do what he wants,” he said, “and find out what he’s after.”
“Have you got a secure copy of the patch?”
Richard wheeled to the computer with the patch on it, pulled the memory stick, and held it so that Dagmar could see it. She took the stick from his hand. That left only the copy on the hard drive.
Richard let the intruder through the firewall, and they watched as Patch 2.0 was overwritten by something else.
“Slightly smaller file size,” Richard said after a few minutes’ analysis. “Still an executable file. Best guess is that it’s an earlier version of the patch.”
“Or a patch that’s been rewritten.”
Richard frowned. “Let’s do a comparison.”
More firewalls, software run, code rolling at near light speed on the monitors.
“There’s a difference,” Richard said, pointing. Code highlighted in blinking red. Dagmar narrowed her eyes, looked from one screen to the next.
“It’s a bank routing code,” Dagmar said. “The… intruder”-the other me-“he’s changing the program to send money to a different account.” She loo
ked at the prefix. “An account in a different country, I think.”
Richard’s scanning program found other changes. Dagmar scanned the symbols and compared one to the next and tried to summon the programming skills she’d once possessed.
You could tell the difference between the programmers. The original code was elegant and concise; the new stuff consisted of code laid down in huge swaths, clumsy and overhasty.
But it would work, this new code. It would work perfectly well.
“Charlie’s patch,” she said, “sends the patch to every other bot the program knows about, then turns the bot off. But that feature has been deleted in this new one. It just lets the program run.”
“But it changes the bot’s owner.”
“Yes. All the profits get sent to the new account.”
Richard nodded. “Elegant,” he said. “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.”
The new boss kills people, she thought. Dips nails in rat poison and packs them around explosive cores.
He looked at her. “Which one of the bosses is the bomber? Which is the Maffya?”
She thought about it. “Does it matter?”
Richard’s face took on a grim cast. He rolled his chair to a third machine and began typing.
“I’m going to find out what our intruder’s been up to.”
He scanned data for a moment, then turned to Dagmar again.
“You’ve been in all sorts of places where you’re not allowed,” he said. “Someone’s given you superuser status.”
“Who can do that?” Dagmar asked.
“Me. And Charlie Ruff, but he’s dead.”
“Can you find out who made me a superuser?”
More tapping. He frowned. “Someone who shouldn’t be a superuser, either, but he is. He has the handle CRAPJOB.”
A thousand pieces fell into place in Dagmar’s head, an action like a reverse explosion, a million bits of shrapnel flying together to form a perfect, seamless platonic solid.
She was astonished there was no sound. She should have heard the universe cracking.
Her heart and the jolt of adrenaline caught up long after the moment of comprehension, too late, useless for anything except making her hands tremble…
Richard tapped his keyboard. “Man!” he said. “That CRAPJOB account is only three days old! And then all CRAPJOB did was grant you superuser status, and since then all the activity’s been on your account.”
He turned, looked over his shoulder. “Any idea who this is?”
Dagmar shook her head. Unconvincingly, she thought.
Richard turned back to his machine. “I’ll cancel that account,” he said. “And yours. And then we’ll give you a new account.”
“No!” Dagmar lunged from her chair and put her hand over his. Richard looked at her in surprise.
“What’s the matter?”
“When you’re played,” Dagmar said, “you play back.”
Richard’s eyes narrowed in thought.
“We tell him what he wants to know,” Dagmar said. “And then we pull the rug out from under him.”
Richard the Assassin looked at her with a growing admiration.
“Excellent,” he said.
ACT 3
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE This Is Not a Place to Hide
Dagmar cleaned her office. Dropping Siyed’s faded flowers, one pot after another, into the trash can, the series of clangs ringing off the walls, echoing down the hall.
A warning Klaxon.
Dagmar on the warpath. Stay away.
She picked up the trash can with its ceramic, earth, and plant matter and carried it away in a swirl of dry petals. She didn’t have a place to put it, really, so she took it to the break room and swapped it for the trash can there. It held only used tea bags, foil packets that had once contained instant hot chocolate, and an empty donut box.
It was a lot lighter.
He had trapdoors everywhere, Charlie had said. He’d been thinking about doing a scorched-earth on the company long before I took control… Wiping out everything before the creditors could have it, or lurking in the computers in order to sabotage our successors or to steal things. Bad as the damn Soong. He could have ended up in jail!
Except that Charlie had locked him out before he could do any damage. It had been Dagmar herself who gave him a computer, an account, and a paycheck. Once he had access, he used one of his trapdoors to create CRAPJOB and alter Dagmar’s own account so that he could use it to go anywhere in AvN Soft’s system.
The balance of the account, as of 1600 hours Cayman time yesterday, was $12,344,946,873.23, all in U.S. dollars.
That had been posted on Our Reality Network, where anyone could read it. The players assumed the numbers had been made up, but Dagmar had known they were real.
And one other person had seen that number and realized right away what Charlie had done, and had known how to turn the whole thing to his own advantage.
Figueroa? That’s on Figueroa, right?
My God, she’d spoken Charlie’s location aloud right in front of him.
She remembered him standing ten feet away, sipping his coffee, pretending he wasn’t listening.
She remembered him in the steak house, the dull fury in his eyes as he talked about Charlie stealing his company.
Dagmar went into her office and dropped the trash can next to her desk. Another clang.
She grabbed a dusty stack of papers from her shelf and, without looking at them, dumped them in the trash. They’d been there for months: if they were important, she’d have needed them by now.
You are helping, she’d said. You’re the only person I can talk to.
And then she’d handed him all he needed in order to kill Charlie and collect millions. Billions.
He had played her. He had played her totally.
His games back at Caltech had always been about deviousness and betrayal. All the nonplayer characters in the games had their own agenda. They all functioned within ruthless, logical parameters. They were all treacherous, all faithless, all false. Charlie, Dagmar, and Austin had grown to trust the fact that they would be stabbed in the back sooner or later.
Dagmar hadn’t realized that the games were autobiography. All those false-hearted mercenaries, recreant knights, and traitorous grandmothers were the same person.
They were all BJ.
***
All along he had been telling the world how his mind worked, and everyone had thought it was fiction.
She could reconstruct his chain of logic.
Charlie and BJ had worked on Rialto together. They both created the algorithm that the agents used to acquire knowledge and evolve new strategies.
Why, he must have wondered, should Charlie be the only one to profit?
Charlie had cheated him. Let the company go into bankruptcy just so that he could buy it with money he’d earned on the sly.
Charlie owed him. Owed him on the business, the money, the clothes, the cars, the homes. Owed him half of everything.
Charlie wasn’t paying that debt-and the debt was greater than BJ had ever imagined, half of twelve billion, as he had just discovered. So when chance made the opportunity not only desirable but profitable, Charlie was punished by having his face shredded from his skull with sixpenny nails.
Which didn’t quite solve the problem, because it only reduced the number of people who knew about the gold-farming bots from three to two.
Dagmar had to be dealt with, too.
Because, in this line of utilitarian reasoning, Dagmar was just another obstacle.
Dagmar found another pile of old papers and heaved them into the trash. The can rocked; a small cloud of dust rose.
She looked at the rocking trash can and dared it to tip over.
It chose obedience and returned to an upright setting.
Richard entered the room on his silent white Converse sneaks, a laptop in his hands. His nose wrinkled at the scent of dust.
“I’ve got your new mac
hine. And your new account.”
“Very good.”
She dumped another stack of papers to clear a space on the desk, and Richard put the machine down.
By then, Richard had found out how Dagmar’s account had been compromised. A keystroke monitor had been installed on her office computer, one that recorded every single letter or numeral that she typed and made it available for download by someone else. It had given away her passwords, which were the keys to everything else. BJ had found Patch 2.0 on the IMAP server and acted to replace it with his own, searching through the entire system for the patch and its copies, then overwriting them with the patch that had the number of his own offshore account.
I’m looking for the script for Week Six, Part One, BJ had said. She’d found him using her computer. He had just installed the keystroke monitor.
Dagmar should have recognized BJ’s careless, sloppy coding. He was always in too much of a hurry for elegant code.
Richard set up the computer and connected it with a cable to the AvN Soft network.
“You don’t use the wireless network now,” Richard said. “You don’t know who’s going to be listening.”
“Check,” Dagmar said.
Her old computer would be used entirely for routine correspondence, and for anything she wanted BJ to know.
Richard handed her a portable memory card. “Here’s all the details of Charlie’s correspondence with the brokerage firms.”
“Thanks.”
The new computer, with her new online identity, would be used for anything important.
She booted the new computer, paged through Charlie’s email on the memory card, and wrote the first of several emails to the officers of various brokerage firms. She let them know that, after Mr. Ruff’s unfortunate death, she was now handling the matter of the bootleg Rialto programs, and she hoped to continue the same degree of cooperation, particularly in the matter of the trades for Tapping the Source Ltd. on the following Monday.
She sent that letter eighteen times. A brief business letter, eighteen times, to help save the world.
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