After On

by Rob Reid

  The second great mass murder force multiplier is the number of co-conspirators. Before Oklahoma City, plenty of Schlitz-swilling lowlifes had killed small handfuls of unfortunates. Then Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols took things to a radical new level by joining forces and combining their strengths and expertise. Organized terror cells, even tiny ones, likewise claim far more victims than lone NRA fanboys who go off their meds.

  This is why Jaysh al Hisaab threatens to become a singularly destructive force. Its virulent ideology can spontaneously unify small teams of nutcases, who on their own might only kill a handful of those closest to them and be done. San Francisco illustrates this chilling point. Its perpetrators combined two highly complementary biotech skill sets with deep access to a major skyscraper’s innards. No one person brings all of this to the table, let alone six arms to act with.

  Jaysh furthermore advocates truly random and maximal slaughter. And it is this orientation that turns a lust for weapons of mass destruction into one for weapons of total destruction. Weapons of total destruction—let’s call them “WTD”—are senseless if you’re trying to kill these people, but not those people. This is why we don’t have to worry about Al Qaeda unleashing highly weaponized Ebola upon the world, soulless and sick as its leaders are. But now we have Jaysh, just in time for the birth of broadly accessible WTD, which will uniquely appeal to full-spectrum nihilists.

  Some call for us good guys to get highly adept at WTD-related technologies, so as to gain knowledge to better foil the baddies. But recall that the active ingredient in this week’s near miss sprang from that good-guy hotbed of Yale University. And many other fortresses of light and truth have proven to be extremely leaky vessels for dark forces bred in captivity by good-guy scientists. For instance, in 2001, the planet’s most lethally weaponized anthrax was under the tightest imaginable locks and keys in our government’s own biodefense lab at Fort Detrick. Shortly after 9/11, with all US defenses at their highest-ever alert, those very spores made their way to the office of the Senate majority leader! If the United States government can’t keep its own WMD out of the chambers of its own leaders when at maximum vigilance—and it cannot—advancing WTD technology as a countermeasure to future terror is patently insane.

  The half-forgotten lesson of the anthrax attacks is that all vessels are leaky. Terrorism is meanwhile shifting from being a means of communication by groups, to a form of self-expression by individuals. In this environment, the only safe place for WTD technologies is the pages of science fiction novels. And even that, we might question.

  Mitchell and Kuba were at that most suspicious of places, at that most suspicious of moments, for three perfectly innocent reasons, Officer. First, Beasley was a creature of habit (a lousy trait for his line of work—although his was not deemed a combat-vulnerable post). Second, white though his own hat is, Kuba can be a helluva black-hat hacker when provoked. And third, the purpose of Kuba’s hacking was to solve a heinous crime. A murder, in fact! Which means it wasn’t really black-hat hacking, right? So we actually have pure innocence across the board—on the minor hacking charge, as well as the uber-major thing, see?

  Kuba agreed to make one of his rare forays to the dark side at the tail end of that marathon powwow at SB-null. Arrayed against the intelligence world’s mightiest and most secretive arm, the guys figure the one advantage they might possibly generate is a tiny element of surprise. Not that they could sneak up on the Authority, of course. But they might sneak up on Beasley. Beasley, who all but preconfessed to Jepson’s murder in that intercepted memo (which has since, somewhat awkwardly, vanished into Poof!’s memory hole). Beasley, who—for all his eerie competencies—is bumbling when dealing with humans. Properly ambushed, bumbling Beasley might just blurt an incriminating fact or nine. And captured on video, these might afford some leverage in the looming showdown with the Authority (a long shot, yes. But can you think of a better plan?).

  So Kuba hacks into Beasley’s personal data store within Phluttr. There, he finds (as he could have found on any Phluttr user) meticulous GPS records logging the comings and goings of Beasley’s every Phluttr-infested device since the day he signed up for the service as User #0,000,000,004. This reveals where he lives (in a small detached house with a murky ownership history on a nondescript Potrero Hill block). It also shows that he invariably leaves for work between 6:58 and 7:06 A.M. Beasley’s famous for always traveling by bike, rain or shine. And the house’s façade is almost flush to the sidewalk. So bracketing it (Kuba tucked into some shrubbery to the left, Mitchell behind a tree to the right) should let them accost him, whether he pops out the front door or the garage with that damned folding bike of his. And with GoPros mounted subtly on their persons, they’ll capture every golden moment!

  All told, it’s an incredibly professional hit. Both guys tense as the garage door rises majestically, tugged by a most lethargic genie. They scarcely notice the passing…what the hell was it? A…beige Camry, maybe? It’s just so nondescript, they’re not looking for it, and it passes at an innocuous speed. They don’t even hear anything odd! Well, they hear something drop in the garage. But they mistake that for a creaky pang from the aging door as it rises. They then just stand there like morons for at least a minute after the door has opened. And that’s not what a murderer would do, now, is it?

  And no, Your Honor. That exculpatory motionless minute was not, unfortunately, recorded by the GoPros, the Baghdad-ambassador-grade home security system, nor the CCTV camera with the expansive view of the scene mounted in the minimart window across the street. The simultaneous outage of all that gear during the key ten-minute stretch is just monumentally bad luck for our side—and was not engineered to hide the culpability of one Kuba Stanislaw! Who, admittedly, is something of a master hacker. We also maintain that Mr. Stanislaw’s departure from the scene—which the miraculously rebooted neighborhood CCTV did manage to record shortly after the incident—in no way proves his involvement! Although given the misleading power of this spurious evidence, we may concede this point in exchange for, say…life without the possibility of parole?

  Kuba signals Mitchell after the tense minute has passed. Not a peep from the garage, and still the door yawns open. Catching one another’s eyes, they shrug. Then Kuba shows his palm like a traffic-stopping cop and points at his chest, volunteering to be the one to investigate. He cautiously and soundlessly extracts himself from the shrubbery. Then as soon as he sees the garage’s interior, he blanches and freezes. After what seems like an eternity, he signals for Mitchell to witness the scene.

  Beasley lies dead, in a small pool of blood—a tight cluster of tiny wounds right over his heart. Whatever the make and color of that damned car, the guy riding shotgun was one hell of a marksman.

  At first, the SFPD is way less intrigued by the Potrero Hill shooting than anyone else with a stake in it. They’re just not privy to enough highly classified facts (as in, not any) to know it as anything other than a drive-by. A weird one, to be sure. Location, victim, time of day, suspect—all of it’s off; even way off. But this country sees plenty of weird drive-bys in any given year. And every so often, one’s just gonna happen in your town. Things get a lot more interesting in the late morning, when a suspect gets fingered by the Leak-O-Matic (the nickname of the mysterious source of anonymous tips that blew open the doors on the Ebola bombing). Then they get really freakin’ interesting when the closely guarded (make that, top secret) identity of the Potrero Hill victim leaks on that damned blog. That makes this the Siamese twin of the Jepson murder —the city’s most headline-grabbing crime since the Moscone/Milk thing wayyy back in 1978!

  Parties more connected than the city cops find the Beasley assassination plenty interesting from the get-go. Let’s start with the Authority, which hadn’t lost an operative to enemy fire since Khartoum in 2013 (because Jepson wasn’t really an operative, nor was he done in by enemy fire. Not technically, anyway). They’re all over this thing instantly! By the time the local numbskull cops
arrest that laughably innocent Polish kid in the midmorning, it’s clear the orders came from Beijing. Flawlessly scouted, timed, and clean as it was, this hit involved multiple top-flight agents. Only China and Israel have enough assets in or near enough to northern California to gather such a team without setting off any number of Authority trip wires (long story, that. Oh, and it’s classified). And no way was it Israel for a long list of reasons (all classified, too. Sorry). So, the culprit’s no mystery.

  As for the motive? Well, that’s another matter. China is powerful and confident enough to risk international heat by offing someone who truly threatens its interests. But Beasley? Sure, the guy was capable, and key to a very important asset. But his work only threatened China in the most general and abstract of ways—and China no more than any other party not precisely aligned with the US! Baffled, pissed off, and spooked, the Authority resorts to a cunning cyber exploit that it’s kept up its sleeve for a situation just like this and plumbs several hypersensitive networks and servers within China’s intelligence infrastructure, hoping to figure out what the hell those people were thinking.

  The exploit fails. But it doesn’t go unnoticed. Its detection triggers flurries of worries—as well as a monster set of reactions, counterreactions, counter-counterreactions, and so on, clear out to the nth counter (with n being a very large triple-digit number whose precise value we could debate and analyze for weeks, but let’s not). And this is merely what happens within the various arms of the Chinese government! If nations were the unitary, rational actors that foreign policy wonks invoke whenever their models-of-state conduct require absurd simplifications, this…thing called “China” would parse the digital intrusion, formulate a cogent, streamlined response, and execute upon it. But governments staffed by tens (yes, tens) of millions of people just don’t roll like that. Not even in the clearest of circumstances. And today ain’t clear. Indeed, it’s socked in by a pea-soup murk that’s starting to resemble the fog of war.

  The trick is that China’s leaders (like all leaders) compartmentalize highly sensitive information. Only a tiny handful of them know about the Beasley hit. Which (yeah, bingo) China did perpetrate. Although not due to a sublime calculus of National Interest—but because certain honchos were tricked into viewing Beasley as a huge threat by an ingenious new global actor that no one even knows exists! Knowledge of the resulting American cyber attack is also highly restricted. But to a different tiny clique, with almost no overlap between the groups. Beijing’s cyber command therefore quite rationally views this hack as being an unprovoked outrage! New protocols require that cyber outrages be met with some highly visible military fussing (minor troop movements, some tanks dusted off in the full view of spy satellites, and/or a token handful of scrambling jets). The idea is to inform the perp that this shit has been noticed, it is not appreciated, and thou shalt back the fuck down—now. Protocols of this sort functioned as simple but unmistakable signals between the Americans and Soviets throughout the Cold War. Though expensive and ham-fisted, they prevented innumerable small conflicts, and, on three occasions (only one of which was ever known to more than a few dozen people), all-out nuclear war.

  So these sorts of signals can be powerful tools—provided that both sides know precisely what each mobilization means, what triggered it, as well as the proper choreography for de-escalating back to a state of mutual calm. None of which holds today! The Chinese response protocols are new and still under development. As such, they’re unknown in the wider world. They’re also implemented imperfectly by immense organizations that are trying them out for the first time. And, of course, the break-in that China’s cyber team regards as an unprovoked outrage is seen in Washington as an extremely restrained response to an unprovoked assassination! Which means the sides are (mis)communicating about completely separate topics. Adding to the fun, the Authority is so secretive toward its own government that even the White House needs the bureaucratic equivalent of pliers, truncheons, and truth serum to get the simplest facts out of it! And so, those whose job descriptions include reacting to scrambling Chinese jets know nothing about the cyber incursion, or of Beasley. Believing that they’re the ones facing an unprovoked outrage, they scramble a few jets of their own! Then China takes countermeasures (some initiated by newcomers who think they’re responding to an unprovoked outrage). And so on.

  It takes less than an hour for the counter-counter-counter-countermeasures to kick in—and by then, Taiwan is freaking the fuck out! While Taiwan’s bosses have excellent relations with the US military, everything’s happening so fast (and is so monopolizing their Washington contacts) that they’re left to detect the Chinese mobilization on their own. Which is actually quite easy. Remember, those actions are highly visible by design. And when a neighbor who claims to own the island your entire country happens to be sitting on outnumbers you by a factor of fifty, very little in the way of visible military moves escapes your notice. So Taiwan puts all of its assets on high alert in response to this unprovoked outrage! Next, Russia’s pharaoh clues into all of this. Thinking random acts of unhinged thuggishness have suddenly gone mainstream, he amps up his own brand of crazy just to keep leading the world at something!

  Military mobilizations—even top secret ones—have casts of thousands. Many more thousands quickly become aware of them, and millions soon detect murky signals that something fucked up is afoot. A scrambling pilot’s wife posts an agonized thought to social media. A corrupt general shunts $100 million to an offshore bank. Certain bankers react to this faint but chilling signal that something’s awry. A midsized mutual fund picks up on the bankers’ reaction and twitches. A CNBC anchor misreads that twitch, then blasts his highly influential interpretation to the world. Soon dozens of governments and millions of people are reacting to one another’s responses to dire events that few of them know anything about. It’s as if God racked billions of billiards on a cosmic, ten-dimensional table, and Zeus just broke. Good luck calculating how that’s gonna end! Even with much of the processing power in the universe. Or (more relevantly) in the multiverse, it simply cannot be done.

  Serena Kielholz stands out at Phluttr like a plutonium-powered lighthouse on a clear Arctic night. She’d stand out more, only Phluttr’s workforce is a good 30 percent better-looking and less obese than a cross section of like-aged Americans. She sticks out a bit less on the Stanford campus (more like a jet-fueled lighthouse in Siberia, say; but with kickass LEDs that can still cause retinal damage). The closest she ever came to blending in with the crowd was at an Abercrombie & Fitch photo shoot. And even there, she unwittingly turned a third of the boys into born-again breeders while giving half the girls fresh body issues (to which you might say, “Karma’s a bitch,” given the damage those bitches inflict on the rest of the world; only they’re really just cogs in the media wheel who were born that way and who need to make rent like anyone; so be nice).

  This is why Mitchell can’t help but notice her amidst the breakfast crowd in the Phree cafeteria. He’s here because calories can reboot a crashing brain, and his is beset by shock and gloom. Not an hour ago, he and Kuba cleared right out of Beasley’s neighborhood. Yeah, they might’ve called 911. But job number one was bolting before the mystery car could return and mow them down. They thought they’d done a slapdash but adequate job of capturing the full scene on their GoPros. But upon ducking into a private conference room back in the protective bustle of Phluttr HQ, they discover that their cameras had suffered appallingly awkward outages. Kuba’s weekly midlevel staff meeting at the PhastPhorwardr—one led by Beasley, of all people—was by then about to start, and it seemed best he attend. They weren’t yet sure how to report the homicide, and it might look funny for Kuba to be AWOL when no one else knows the meeting will be canceled on account of its leader’s assassination. So Mitchell’s at the cafeteria solo, and will reconvene with Kuba around nine thirty.

  Serena does not look good. No, let’s correct that: she looks amazing. Only, she doesn’t look at all happy.
Indeed, she looks dazed with grief. Plenty of people are dazed in the wake of Jepson’s murder, the bioterror bust, and everything else—but Serena’s taking this to suborbital heights. Processing this, it strikes Mitchell: she was in love. Yes, Jepson was old enough to be her dad (or at least, a founder her dad funded back when she was in diapers). This surely marked him as a perv, a pederast, or worse (and no, there was nothing gentlemanly about waiting until a yoctosecond after her eighteenth birthday to seduce her). But they were in those dawning honeymoon moments, and Jepson could ooze worldliness, charm, and smarts even when he wasn’t trying. And though he would inevitably be an ass to her at some point, there simply hadn’t been time for that yet.

  Mitchell also has enough female friends to know a bit about the psychology of knockouts. By their midteens, grotesque numbers of loathsome grown-ups have tried to ply them into sexual situations (peers, too, but that’s another issue). This can have any number of consequences. Brainy and more confident girls often mature beyond their years, to better parse the bombardment of signals they’re receiving from adults. By the time they enter adulthood themselves, guys their own age can seem like children to them. Guys twice their age might even seem like children. And Jepson—though unacceptably old by any metric—was a young unacceptably old and must have flattered the mind of this plainly intelligent woman whose physique was surely over-flattered with ickily excess frequency. He probably struck her as a man. A man, in a world of boys. One who happened along just when she was at an age when the world can seem maximally magical.