Killfile

by Christopher Farnsworth

  Ordinarily, this is what you’d need to get past all that:

  You would have to hire at least four subcontractors, experienced people who’d done hard and soft entry before. They would approach the offices in a variety of disguises: FedEx courier, temp secretary, bicycle messenger, homeless man. They’d spend a couple of weeks taking discreet pictures on their phones, exploring fire stairs and exits, measuring security’s response time. Then you’d get the building’s blueprints from the city or county and check the design against any remodeling that had been done since the building went up. Once you’d made and memorized a detailed map of the premises, you’d have your whole team take positions on the day of the actual breach. You’d have your homeless guy start a fire or something outside the lobby, create a nice distracting layer of chaos, the kind that brings firefighters and EMTs running in response. You’d have your FedEx guy and your bike messenger and your secretary waiting inside with their gear. They’d hit the fire alarms, and everyone in OmniVore’s offices would run like hell to avoid being gassed to death by the Halon fire-suppressant system that automatically triggers to protect the computers. Then they would switch into helmets and fire coats and oxygen masks, and race up the fire stairs and smash-and-grab as many computers they could find before the real firefighters and the cops showed up.

  Even if you did all this perfectly, with the best operators you could find, it would take two months, minimum, and maybe a hundred grand in up-front costs. And you’d still have only a fifty-fifty chance of actually pulling it off.

  Fortunately, I’m not a mere mortal like you. For me, it starts with finding just one guy.

  A FEW DECADES ago, Max Renfrow would have led a very lonely life. He would have been a math geek and the president of the chess club, and nobody would have understood his references to Monty Python and Doctor Who.

  But that’s all changed, thanks to the Internet. It’s created a world where his talents are valued and people can Google his jokes if necessary. Tonight, Max is filled with the confidence of a high school quarterback as he enters the trendy little craft-cocktail bar in downtown San Jose. He knows the secret language of machines and he’s got a six-figure salary with stock options. He views every woman in the bar as his property; they just haven’t realized it yet.

  So when he sees the insanely hot woman sitting alone, he immediately heads over to her.

  He smiles and takes the seat next to her. He orders a drink for himself—“and another one of whatever she’s having,” he tells the bartender. he tells himself.

  Kelsey smiles at him and says thanks. I’m a few seats away, but to Max, I might as well be invisible.

  He doesn’t know it, but he’s exactly the guy we’ve been waiting for.

  I PLUCKED MAX from the mess of OmniVore programmers, purple IDs on lanyards around their necks, dribbling out of the building in irregular spurts for lunch and dinner. Most of them went right back to the office with a Subway bag in hand, ready for another twelve hours of work. It’s still considered bad form to put in anything less than a sixteen-hour day in Silicon Valley. Even stepping out for a sandwich is a tiny form of rebellion, a way of saying they value fresh air and sunlight more than the free snacks in the break room.

  A brief, surface read of their thoughts showed that most of them didn’t have room in their lives for anything but data analysis or network access. And those who did were usually new hires, lacking the kind of seniority I needed.

  But there were a few who were secure enough to risk going out after work. They put on fresh T-shirts and jeans and headed out to the bars, ready to prove their alpha-male status and bring home a mate.

  Out of those few, I chose Max.

  Max is a senior programmer, positioned just right in the org chart to have access to what I need to know, but not so high that he belongs to Preston’s inner circles. Looking into his head, I saw his identity, his self-image, wrapped protectively around his job, that purple ID card like a badge of honor on his chest.

  I scooped his weekly routine from his brain and stationed Kelsey at his favorite after-work spot.

  “Get him to talk about his work,” I told her.

  She rolled her eyes. “Ask me for something hard.”

  “I’m serious. I mean specifics. Get him to drill down into his job as much as possible.”

  “I got it.”

  “Are you sure?”

  Lens flare of irritation, which I’m starting to see whenever she thinks I underestimate her. “I talk to people like this for a living,” she reminded me. “All they do is talk about their work. Believe me. I got it.”

  FOR A MOMENT, I’m worried.

  Max has read a lot of advice about women on the Internet, none of it good. He’s filled with strategies and methods, all of which are supposed to guarantee that women will melt into puddles of submissive goo at his feet.

  Case in point: his opening line. “Your boyfriend teach you to drink that stuff?” he asks, pointing to Kelsey’s whiskey. This is supposed to put her on the defensive, make her crave his approval, and get the conversation started.

  She stares at him for a long moment. He waits for her reply. And waits. And waits.

  He loses his nerve after about ten seconds of silence. “Uh, I mean, you know, women usually, like. Drink white wine. Or something fruity.”

  “Maybe you need to meet more women,” Kelsey says.

  There’s a feeling that ripples through him. It’s hard to put into words. It sort of sounds like a sad trombone.

  I’m afraid this means we’re going to get nothing but bad pickup lines from him. Kelsey, however, reads him as well as I do, and she doesn’t even have any superpowers. She finds just the right key to wind him up.

  “So what do you do?” she asks, and he lights up. (Literally. His brain suddenly switches into high gear, all kinds of neural activity waking up, and I can see all of it.)

  “I’m in development at OmniVore Tech,” he says, with the right combination of humility and pride.

  Most people around here have heard of the company. Even if a woman is interested in him only because he might be rich, she’ll know the name. Most people also automatically assume he’s doing something incredibly cool and cutting edge from the seat of his Aeron chair. This is where he usually shines, where he gets to tell people how he’s making the future right in front of them.

  Kelsey restrains a yawn. “Oh yeah. I know those guys.”

  He’s stunned. It’s like a small car wreck happened in his brain. He can see she’s not some ditz who doesn’t realize there are companies behind Twitter and Google. But she’s not impressed. He doesn’t know what to say next. He charges ahead with his usual next line, even though she didn’t ask.

  “Uh, yeah, I’m in charge of interfacing over different network architectures,” he says. (This is a small lie. He’s not in charge—there are five people in his section alone who tell him what to do—but he’s high enough, which is why I picked him.) “See, what we do is—”

  Kelsey scans the crowd over his shoulder. “Oh, I know what you do. I’m in finance. I sat through your CEO’s presentation when he was looking for his last round of funding.”

  He smiles. “How much did you end up giving him?”

  Kelsey smiles back, her teeth much sharper than his. “Nothing. We passed.”

  “Oh,” he says. That stops him short. His company is supposed to be the Next Big Thing. It was on Re/code and everything. He’s got stock options. Everything he knows about the company says that it will make him rich when OmniVore’s IPO finally hits. But Kelsey doesn’t seem impressed. This worries him. “Did you say you passed?”

  Kelsey nods. “No offense, but we decided OmniVore isn’t really equipped to be the market leader.”

  Now I’m sure she’s gone too far.

  “Oh come on,” he says, his pride rearing up and thumping its chest. “Who else out there even comes close
to us?”

  Kelsey starts reciting a list: “Axciom, UpDog, Palantir—”

  “We are so far ahead of those guys—”

  “And of course, eventually Google is just going to start grabbing everything that comes through its search portal, analyze it in real time, and stomp the market flat for the rest of you.”

  “Google? Let me tell you why we laugh at Google. Are you ready for this?”

  And he’s off. Max’s eyes are bright, he’s slurping his drink instead of sipping it, and the facts of his job are rolling through his head like bowling balls down the lane. When Kelsey casually mentions the words “passwords” and “security” and “access,” those sections of his mind open up and I’m free to root around in his best-kept secrets.

  An hour later, Kelsey glances over Max’s shoulder again, and I nod. I’ve got everything I need.

  She thanks Max for the drinks and stands up. She’s even kind to him when she turns him down. He’s a much more interesting guy when he’s geeking out than when he’s playing Buddy Love. He’s given me everything we need, and more.

  I’m sorry I ever doubted her.

  [20]

  I make my entrance into OmniVore headquarters the next evening at 11:00 P.M. I walk in through the front door.

  Just for tonight, I’m part of the cleaning crew, which is mostly staffed by illegal immigrants. Their bosses squeeze the maximum square footage of clean office space out of each worker, so they usually end up alone and unsupervised, trying desperately to clean a whole floor before moving on to the next building on the night’s schedule.

  And each one of them has an all-access pass to every office in the building.

  Most corporations already know about this glaringly obvious hole in their security. The guys who spend millions to protect their corporate secrets still can’t resist cheaping out on their cleaning contracts, however. The worst they can imagine is one of the janitors going through a desk for valuables. Other than that, they don’t think about it. The people in coveralls and uniforms barely register to the men who hire them; they hardly even exist.

  I found my janitor the same way I found Max: hanging around outside the building and watching the crews as they emerged after work. I got a good look into their minds as they headed back to their van. Even at 1:00 A.M., most of them were on their way to a second job, which meant they’d work more hours in a day than any programmer, and not while sitting down either. Most of them had families. That’s why they were sweating all night: to put some cash away to give their sons and daughters a better life than they’d ever see. I could feel the hope and the exhaustion coming off them like steam.

  They were useless. They had too much to lose.

  Fortunately, there’s always at least one guy who’s looking for an excuse to get fired. That was Anthony.

  Anthony left work every night in time to catch the last shift at the strip club. He was already planning ahead for the weekend, when he’d drive his rebuilt Camaro across the state line into Nevada and blow whatever was left of his paycheck at the craps tables.

  I approached him with cash in hand, and rented his uniform and his place on the night shift for five hundred bucks.

  The supervisor and all of Anthony’s coworkers look right at me, but they don’t see me. They see the picture I’m putting in their heads: Anthony, slouched behind his cleaning cart, filling out his uniform as usual.

  This is my version of an invisibility cloak. The technical term is “inattentional blindness,” a kind of cognitive dead zone in your visual field. Your brain is constantly bombarded with more stimuli than it can possibly handle: about fourteen million bits of information a second, according to the guys who keep count of that sort of thing. It has to narrow all those millions of bits down to a manageable amount just so you aren’t paralyzed by all the incoming data. So it takes shortcuts. It cheats.

  Your vision, for instance. Over a third of your brain is dedicated to processing the details streaming in from your eyes, and it’s still not enough. So your brain ignores most of what you see. The couch in the living room, the tree outside your office window, the people standing with you in line for the ATM—your brain skims right over them to save time and energy. It fills in the gaps with the same images over and over, like the scenery behind the characters in one of those old Hanna-Barbera cartoons. That’s the reason that you don’t see your missing car keys on the front table, even when you’ve looked there a dozen times. They faded into the background.

  In other words, you really only see what you expect to see. And I can manage those expectations. Everyone here expects to see Anthony, and their minds supply all the details I need to hide in plain sight. To them, I’m as invisible as chewing gum on the sidewalk.

  Unless they step in it, of course.

  We push the carts into the elevators, past the security guards at the front desk. I’m subtly reinforcing their apathy by broadcasting in every direction. Sure enough, they don’t give me a second look.

  I can’t fool the cameras, though. They’re everywhere now. I’m pretty sure my ball cap and three-day stubble are enough to beat any facial-recognition software that OmniVore might have, but it won’t stand up when a real person checks the video tomorrow.

  It won’t matter. Tomorrow will be way too late.

  I BREAK AWAY from the rest of the cleaning crew, taking my little cart up twenty-six stories to OmniVore’s offices.

  Anthony’s key card opens the doors, and I walk inside. I remove a steering-wheel lock hidden in the cart and stick it through the door handles. The doors themselves are wood paneling over a fireproof steel core; the building code requires it. It would take a forklift to break them down, so I should have time to work.

  OmniVore’s space is set up along an open floor plan. It doesn’t have cubicles, let alone offices. The desks are arranged in some kind of fractal pattern, probably designed by an industrial consultant at $350 an hour to maximize efficiency and proper communication. The whole place hums with raw computing power: there’s a rack of machines in one corner, hooked to the workstations, quietly processing terabytes of raw data. There’s a kitchen area devoted to snacks, with espresso machines, Sub-Zero refrigerators, and smoothie makers. There’s a gym area, including a climbing wall built into the concrete that goes all the way up to the ceiling. There are sofas with pillows for power naps. In another corner, there are foosball tables and classic arcade games—which should be a little too dot-com for a company like OmniVore, actually. The whole place is an adult version of a preschool, filled with soft corners and fun toys.

  There’s only one office with actual doors and walls: it’s a huge, two-story atrium, like a glass rocket aimed at the ceiling. It surrounds a couch, table and chairs, and a desk cut from a massive slab of redwood. There’s only one screen in the room, a giant HD display on the desk, with a tasteful little brushed-aluminum keyboard in front of it.

  Preston’s inner sanctum. Big glass windows so he can see out, but I have no doubt that the glass goes opaque at the push of a button whenever he decides he wants privacy.

  There’s a clear line from Preston’s office to the fire exit. That’s good. I use a metal wedge to jam that door shut so no one can sneak in behind me. Then I make a quick circuit of the rest of the area.

  There’s food on the floor, trash everywhere, and gum stuck to the desks. These guys are slobs. If I was actually here to do Anthony’s job, I’d be in trouble.

  Instead, I remove my packages from the cleaner’s cart and place them close to any computer I find. The open floor plan helps. Walls might have seriously screwed up the range and impact.

  I head back to Preston’s office.

  Unsurprisingly, Anthony’s key card does not work on the reader on Preston’s door. It blares loudly at me, a warning not to try it again. I’m sure the unauthorized entry was logged somewhere, but nobody’s going to come running for an honest mistake by the janitor.

  There’s a keypad. Just for fun, I try th
e passcode I fished out of Max’s head.

  The door alarm blares again, louder this time. Two strikes. Now I’m sure that another attempt will bring security.

  I didn’t really expect the passcodes and key card to work. Just like he’s the only one in the office with a door that locks, Preston’s the sort of guy who has to have control of his own secrets.

  I wasn’t able to snag any of his passwords or security codes when I went on my raid inside his head. Even if I had, it would be stupid to expect that they remain the same from day to day. A guy like Preston understands security. He knows you need a constantly shifting passcode, keyed to an authentication token, like a chip on a smartcard. Or, even better, something like retinal scanning.

  I don’t have that. I have a short-handled sledgehammer. It breaks the lock on the door with one swing.

  Alarms immediately begin shrieking. It’s annoying, but I’ve worked with gunfire going past my head, so it’s not enough to distract me. I drop the sledge and wheel the cart through the door, then get behind Preston’s desk.

  I pick up the desk phone and dial a number I’ve been saving in the back of my memory.

  A voice on the other end. “Hello?”

  He sounds groggy. Well, even boy billionaires need their sleep.

  “Hello, Preston,” I say.

  I didn’t get passwords, but I did manage to retain Preston’s personal cell number. I know he keeps it with him constantly—he’s got the same complicated, needy relationship with his toys as any other geek—and he’ll always pick up for a call coming from work, even at three in the morning.

  “I thought you’d want to know that in less than five minutes, you’re going to get a call from security, letting you know that someone has broken into your office,” I tell him.

  Preston knows this isn’t the protocol. This isn’t how he should be alerted to a security breach. And that wakes him up fast.

  “What? Who is this?” he demands. His voice is instantly alert.

  “I’m the guy who broke into your office, genius,” I say. “It’s John Smith. It’s time we had another talk.”