Advance Praise for
STRANGE FLESH
“If The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo was a titillating introduction to hacker noir, then Strange Flesh seduces us into a rocking threesome with it. Blending taut suspense with tech savvy and vigorous prose, Michael Olson shows us a world so salacious, the real one looks flaccid by comparison. This debut tour de force will leave mystery fans flushed, breathless, and begging for more.
—Dustin Thomason, coauthor of the New York Times and international bestseller The Rule of Four
“In his head-spinning literary thriller, Olson takes us down a rabbit hole of kinky cybersex and multilevel mystery. . . . Reads like John Fowles’ The Magus reimagined by William Gibson on a Red Bull bender . . . [a] complex, cutting edge debut.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Strange Flesh is compelling cyberpunk, filled with plausible cyberwizardry, clever wordplay, murder, betrayal, and heaping helpings of gamer culture and kinky cybersex. Olson skillfully portrays worlds few readers know: quirky computing and robotics geniuses; Harvard’s wealthy, privileged undergraduate royalty; and the surpassingly strange world of online gamers. . . . Crimes, both high and low; bleeding-edge technology; and titillation: What’s not to love?”
—Booklist (starred review)
“Readers can choose their poison in this richly composed slab of transgressive fiction by debut novelist Olson—say, a healthy measure of Neal Stephenson crossed with a slice of Warren Ellis with a serious splash of Nicholson Baker’s sex novels. Crossing the barrier between sex, games and virtual reality, the book is likely to be the only Marquis de Sade-influenced thriller this year. . . . For readers with a penchant for this volatile mix of sex, violence and technology, the payoff is rich indeed.”
—Kirkus Reviews
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2012 by Michael Olson
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information, address Simon & Schuster Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.
First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition April 2012
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Designed by Renata Di Biase
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Olson, Michael.
Strange flesh / Michael Olson.—1st Simon & Schuster hardcover ed.
p. cm.
1. Computer hackers—Fiction. 2. Cyberterrorism—Fiction. 3. Sex toys—
Fiction. I. Title.
PS3615.L75256S77 2012
813’.6 dc22
2011016615
ISBN 978-1-4516-2757-2
ISBN 978-1-4516-2759-6 (ebook)
for my parents
Contents
Prologue
Part I: The Jack of Hearts
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Part II: The King of Hearts
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Part III: The Queen of Hearts
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
Chapter 78
Chapter 79
Chapter 80
Chapter 81
Acknowledgments
Author Bio
Even as Sodom and Gomorrah . . . giving themselves over to fornication, and going after strange flesh, are set forth for an example, suffering the vengeance of eternal fire.
—JUDE 1:7
PROLOGUE
The human mind is prone to infection.
I don’t mean the scorching fevers of meningitis or the insidious tunneling of parasites from unclean food. These days we tend to use the language of disease to discuss ideas: viral memes, contagious media. Vectors and payloads.
We’ve all seen things that take root and keep us up nights. Many of us harbor thoughts that gradually poison our souls. In my case, a single vision has plagued my dreams for the past year or more, and I’m sure it will haunt me for life:
The body of a pretty, pixieish brunette with spiky hair and huge brown eyes rests on a primitive wooden seat made of a few raw boards. Behind her is bolted the upper part of a large drill press tipped on its side. Its spindle extends into the back of the chair. From there, the bit plunges through her skull.
Blood has drenched the front of her white silk robe.
The entry point is right below the hairline of her neck. Her chin is pressed all the way down on her collarbone by the restraints. The drill bit thus protrudes from her mouth: a two-inch ring of high-speed steel with a row of razor teeth around the outside.
Her bonds are subtle, appearing almost innocent. A slender white nylon line at her chin, and one low on her neck.
But they’re part of the mechanism.
The cords run up through a series of pulleys set along the heavy oak ceiling supports and finally down again to a large rusty-brown rock hanging in space. Below it are the charred remains of a thick cardboard tube. A trail
of burnt flooring extends back to an orange disposable lighter lying inches below her left hand.
These remnants tell a brief, violent tale. The orange Bic lit a liquid fuse of accelerant. A line of flames began licking at the cardboard support holding up the rock. When the cardboard collapsed, the rock fell, jerking her head back into the whirring drill bit.
Clearly the product of a sick imagination.
I was first exposed by watching a short video. A record of the actual event, but only a narrow view. Just a tight head shot in which all you can see is the poor girl crying while she recites a cryptic verse. There’s a brief flicker of light . . .
And then carnage.
Finally, you’re left with the gore-stained drill spinning relentlessly where her mouth once was. Spraying blood until the camera runs out of memory.
That picture lodged itself in some dark part of my mind and began feeding on the information I placed next to it: police photographs, the forensics report, stories I heard from those close to her. It grew into a nightmarish scene, like one of those rare cysts surgeons sometimes find filled with hair, fingernails, unseeing eyes, and, of course, teeth. The image grew until that clip stood far above all the other things I wish I’d never seen.
But you can’t unsee something. There’s no cure for an experience.
Learning the story behind the video would radically alter the course of my life. Like an avalanche blocking the only viable pass through a forbidding mountain range.
Looking back, I see how swiftly the illness spread. How she infected me. How her story took over mine. And the strangest thing about the fever this otherworldly woman ignited in me?
I never even met her.
One Year Earlier
1
The Norn seeks you.
Eeyore, one of my friends at work, has marked the message “Urgent.”
What could she want?
The project I’ve toiled on for the past month remains far from finished. It should be weeks before I’m due an accounting with her.
I stumble into the bathroom to get functional, trying to avoid looking in the mirror. Not yet anyway. I take a deep breath and turn the shower on hot.
The Norn is my boss, Susan Mercer, one of the managing partners of Red Rook, a global network security company based in DC. She’s called the Norn—after the Norse pantheon’s Weavers of Fate—due to the degree of her control over the destinies of the firm’s employees. The name is made especially fitting by her habit of embroidering circuit schematics for signals intelligence equipment from the NSA’s Cold War glory days. She is not someone you keep waiting.
The elevator opens onto Mercer’s dimly lit corner suite at our New York office. She sits at an antique desk in her Shaker rocking chair. A bright lamp casts a circle of light on her hands, which move with preternatural authority over an ivory hoop. Her eyes are focused on me.
“James, good of you to come,” she says in a Brahmin drawl.
“No problem.” I take a small glass box out of my bag and set it on her desk. It contains a rare “Bohemian Garnet” Venus flytrap for her terrarium. Mercer adores carnivorous plants, and she tolerates my gifts as sincere expressions of filial devotion. I know little about her domestic situation, but it’s hard to imagine a husband, and I like the idea that at least somebody gives her something. “I hope you don’t kill this one quite so quickly,” I say.
“This plant’s predecessor was a decadent vegetarian. No aptitude for hunting.”
“You probably froze it.”
“My office isn’t a South Carolina swamp. If a thing can’t adapt—”
Her look of delight fades into one of concern as she sees the scrapes on my wrist and then clocks my totally uncharacteristic turtleneck. The morning’s cleanup had required some improvisation. I was robbed last night. That’s how I’ve chosen to characterize it. Just the innocent victim of a simple theft. Happens every day.
“James . . . ?”
She lets the question hang there, but I just smile at her. Mercer is way too old-school to pry into an employee’s personal life, in conversation at least. She watches me for a while but only asks, “Can I offer you some tea?”
“No thanks.” I perch on one of the unstable chairs in front of her desk.
She sets down her project, the blueprint for some ancient mechanical encoding machine; pours herself a cup; and spends a moment regarding the steam as it spirals up into the shadows.
I notice her tea service rests on a set of black lace doilies that have Red Rook’s logo stitched into them. A logo that says a lot about our operation. Its black circle holds a little red symbol in the center that, while decorated with simple battlements and a drawbridge, conforms to the shape of an hourglass more than the outline of our eponymous chess piece. Close observers will see the image for a rendering of the underside of a black widow spider.
Unusual that a legitimate consultancy would use the color black in its trade dress, given that the hacker term “black hat” means “outlaw.” But we are by no means a normal company. Our clients are Fortune 1000 corporations and any American security-related acronym you care to name: FBI, DEA, ATF, CIA, NSA. While we ply our trade only against criminals, the means we use are often of questionable legality. In fact, we maintain a vast array of unlawful botnets, undisclosed “zero day” software exploits, salaried moles in various black hat syndicates, and even a couple agents in foreign cyber-intel organizations. So the felt of our hat is a tasteful gray.
Just as her silence begins to make me nervous, Mercer asks, “The LinkDjinn affair?”
“Looks pretty standard, and I think we already have hooks into the network the attackers used.”
“One of our Ukrainian honeypots?”
“Exactly.”
“I suppose we have Phissure to thank for all this mischief?” This was a group of Vietnamese net scam artists with whom we occasionally did business.
“That’s what my new friends are telling me. The Brains are trying to confirm it.”
Functional roles at Red Rook are classified according to retro high school social stereotypes. The Brains practice traditional hacking like network recon and searching for useful software flaws. Our Greasers run groups of informants. Jocks do “physical” penetrations.
I’m a “Soshe,” a social engineer, one of the lazy reptiles who use the time-honored techniques of the confidence man to compromise our opponents. After all, why spend weeks snooping around trying to capture a password when almost anyone will just tell it to you if you ask the right way? We Socials believe that a bug in your firewall program, once discovered, can be patched in minutes, but the software running the human brain will stay broken forever.
Mercer says, “Well, that may get awkward. But I’m afraid the matter will no longer concern you.”
“Okay . . .” Surely wearing a turtleneck to the office isn’t grounds for a mental-health suspension.
“Tell me, James, what do you know about the Randall family?”
That gets my attention. While quieting the mental turmoil their name causes me, I stall. “The ones who own most of IMP?”
She nods slowly.
“Well, Integrated Media Properties controls enough of the mediascape to be considered, by some, a threat to American democracy. The Randalls have almost all the voting shares.”
“Correct. Anything else?”
“They’ve got newspapers, cable, film studios . . . I understand they’re picking up web start-ups like it’s ’99.”
She arches an eyebrow. “And?”
“And I went to school with them. The twins. At Harvard. They were two years older than me. I can’t say I really know them anymore, but we were in a club together.”
“Phi Beta Kappa, I presume?”
“Ah, no, ma’am.” Mercer is well aware of all of my affiliations, starting with the League City, Texas, Cub Scout pack number 678. The club in question was the Hasty Pudding Society, an ancient order of alcoholism.
A predatory smile. �
�Hmm . . . Though you claim only a passing acquaintance, apparently the Randalls remember you quite well. And have tracked you to our humble enterprise here. It’s very unusual, but you’ve been requested for a meeting with them by name. Or by a diminutive at least. Please tell me you don’t answer to ‘Jimmy Jacks’ anymore.”
That means it must have been Blake who called her.
No one ever calls me by my real name: James John Pryce. I’ve been called Slim for my build, Tex for my place of origin, JJ for brevity, and Thump for reasons that were never quite clear. That’s to say nothing of the brigades of online aliases marching around cyberspace on my behalf. In college what stuck were any of several variants of “Jack,” which is more or less appropriate given my middle name.
J-Jacks, Jackie, Jackalope, Jackamole, Sir Jax-a-Lot. “Jimmy Jacks” was the one in general use. I received that nickname the same night I met Blake Randall.
Strange Flesh Page 1