I sit with that for a second. Despite how smart I thought I was, Godwin knew I was coming. I suddenly feel a lot more exposed.
“Well, I hate to disappoint you, but I am a bit jet-lagged, so I’m just going to head inside and take a nap. We can pick this up later.”
“You’re not going to walk away.”
I force a laugh. “Unless he can see me through solid concrete, I’m pretty sure I am.”
“I’m told you can see what my shooter is seeing,” Godwin says. “Is that true?”
For some reason, I feel a slight chill at that, despite the swamp-like heat in the air. “Yes,” I say. “That’s true.”
“Take a look through my man’s eyes, then. Go ahead. I promise he won’t do anything without my word.”
So I slide into the sniper’s mind and look out through his eyes. I see his point of view through the rifle’s scope, feel the weight of the gun in my arms.
He’s focused on the pillar of the hotel that I’m using to hide. I hear something in his ear. Godwin’s electronic voice, giving an order. “Now,” he says.
The scope moves away, onto one of the children. Small. A little girl. Cleft palate. Holding a begging bowl.
Then the scope moves again, and settles on another one of the kids. Right arm missing from below the elbow. Dirty Spider-Man T-shirt from some well-meaning charity back in the States somewhere. Can’t be more than seven or eight years old.
Then another kid. A boy. Hair flopping over one eye. Reaching for me with one hand, squalling like a baby bird for more cash. Another kid. Hobbling along on a handmade crutch and one leg, the other one severed at the knee.
Finally the scope comes to rest on the youngest child in the crowd, who has to be five years old at the most. He is too young to look sad or miserable. He’s smiling, openmouthed, at all the excitement as the kids crowd around me.
The scope stays centered right on his forehead.
I get the message. Even before Godwin’s voice comes over the phone again.
“You understand now?” he says. “I know you’ve beaten snipers before. Maybe you can jump into my shooter’s head and change his mind. Maybe get him to drop the gun. Or some other stunt. But I think he can still get a shot off first. I know you’re willing to risk your own life. The question is, are you willing to bet that boy’s life on it?”
“You wouldn’t,” I say, but I’m only saying it out of tradition.
There is the by-now-familiar electronic cough that means Godwin is laughing at me. Again. Of course he would. He’s done worse for less. “You come quietly with us. Or that kid dies here for you.”
I can still see through the shooter’s eyes. The crosshairs remain on the child as if painted in place.
“What makes you think I care?”
“Maybe you don’t. Maybe I’ve misjudged you, John. But I know some of what you suffered as a child. And I know that you cannot stand to see any other kids suffer.”
My mouth has gone quite dry. I have to swallow before I reply. “Yeah. But I hate to see myself suffer even more.”
“You’re stalling.”
No shit, I’m stalling. I am not used to someone outthinking me like this. I’m trying to work out the best possible way to debilitate the gunman so that he doesn’t even have a chance to twitch his trigger finger.
Godwin speaks over the phone again. “I hate to be that guy, but I am on a schedule here. So I’m going to count down from five. Then his brains go all over his playmates.”
I wrench my mind away from the gunman. Look at the kid with my own eyes. He’s completely oblivious. I try to will him to run away. No chance. He sees the other kids getting cash and he wants his turn.
“Five.”
I go with Godwin, I end up in a shallow grave somewhere in the jungle. I’ll be nothing but bone fragments in a couple of weeks. Decomposition works fast out there. All those bugs and scavengers. Godwin wins. He wins everything. My whole pointless life is over, and he wins. That’s the really galling part.
“Four.”
And what do I owe this kid anyway? Jesus, who says I have to save every stray out there? He’s living in Laos. His odds are not good for a long, healthy life. What, is he going to grow up to cure cancer or something?
“Three.”
Dammit.
“Two.”
“All right,” I say into the phone. “You’ve got me. Whatever you want. Whatever you say. You win.”
“Well. Yeah.”
He hangs up. I check the gunman’s line of sight, inside his mind again. It’s still steady on the boy.
Then I am forced out into the world again as I notice two men coming toward me in the street. Both grizzled white guys, cut from the same cloth as Nolan and his two friends in Hong Kong. Expats who stay away from the United States not because they can’t go back, but because they’ve found a license to do whatever they want outside of its borders. The worst kind of tourists: the ones who stay.
They shove their way through the children and flank me. One on each side. Before I get more than a surface read—
I feel it almost immediately. They must have used an injector gun. Some kind of mix of ketamine and Demerol and God knows what else.
I start to sag, and they grab my arms and begin marching me along. The kids curse and complain and whine as they drag me away. I get one last look at the boy through my rapidly blurring vision. He notices this time. Gives me a big goofy smile.
Jesus, kid. You’d better grow up to cure cancer.
And then everything goes dim.
24
The God of Win
When I wake up, I am still a little fuzzy from the drugs but otherwise fine. No hangover, no headache, no pain. All my limbs in the right places. I’ve woken up in worse shape after a night of what I’d call fun. If I live through this, I will have to get the recipe for that particular cocktail of drugs. I mean, really. I haven’t felt anything that smooth since I left the CIA. (The government, it should come as no surprise, has all the best drugs.)
I am tied down. Long packing straps pin me to a table in what looks like a prefab wooden building, somewhere hot and damp. If I had to guess, I’d say I’m still in Laos. I can’t sit up, so I turn my head.
There are the broken frames of slot machines, looking like robots that have been gutted, their interiors spilled in front of them on the floor as they have been dismantled for whatever was inside. The flat screens of video poker machines look back at me like a series of black mirrors. A moldering bar runs along the back wall.
I turn my head the other way, and there is Godwin. Sitting not ten feet away from me, in the open door of the building. It is a brilliant, bright day outside, and he is little more than a shadow against the glare. He sits in profile to me, crouched on a stool in front of a small wooden table. It takes me a moment to recognize that it’s a blackjack table—stained with mildew in places, scored with nicks and scratches.
Godwin is slightly older than I’d thought. A dark-haired man in his late forties, wearing a loose sport shirt and khakis—the kind you buy for hiking through the wilderness, not the kind they sell at the Gap. He looks like the host of some Survival Channel show that never made it big.
I’ve never seen him before, or even heard his real voice, but I can read him clearly. And there is no doubt. It’s him.
The man behind Downvote. Finally.
He pays no attention to me, focusing almost totally on the card game in front of him. Drawing cards from an old deck with mismatched colors and placing them down in rows.
He’s playing solitaire. By hand. Does anyone even know how to do that anymore?
Then I look a little deeper, and I see. I start to see who Godwin really is.
He was born in Australia, outside Perth. Father a refinery worker. Mother a housewife. A fairly normal upbringing, until his father couldn�
��t handle his liquor anymore. He got fired from one job after another, then finally took off and left the family for good. Godwin has no idea where he is now, or if he’s even alive.
His mother took care of the kids as best she could. Hotel maid, secretary, clerk in some government office. There were a series of boyfriends and stepfathers, the last one outwardly perfect—good job, nondrinker—but vicious and physically abusive when challenged. That’s about when Godwin began to drift away from the rest of house. He spent his time in his room. He’d built a computer from a kit and used to rack up massive phone bills chatting on bulletin boards. He became increasingly isolated—not too unexpected, given all the time he was spending alone. Inside his head, there are dark shadows around all the memories. His mother and siblings would stop talking when he entered a room. He began to think they didn’t like him. That they were plotting with his stepfather against him.
He read a lot of questionable self-improvement material he found on the Net and in cheap paperbacks. Ayn Rand. Atlas Shrugged. Changed his name then to “GOD of WIN” as his Internet handle. Because that’s how he saw himself. Better. Smarter. Able to move ones and zeros around and shape the world. Typing long messages late into the night to people who didn’t care about his high IQ, his natural superiority.
He had the skills, though. Like Stack, he’s a self-taught coder. He learned everything he knows by doing it. He began hacking for fun and profit. He downloaded porn and sold it to his classmates. Got into school records, changed his grades. Got into bank accounts. Emptied them.
And left home just ahead of an arrest warrant from the local PD.
He was seventeen then. Same age as me when I left home. He knew he’d been sloppy. He left his digital fingerprints all over his first bank heist. Was determined never to make that mistake again.
The next years are a jumbled patchwork of images and impressions. He landed in South Africa, spent a few years there, bounced up to the Czech Republic, then Hungary, and then over to the United States. There might have been a wife in there, or a girlfriend. His memories of her are as insubstantial and fleeting as a ghost.
But he always managed to find work. People would see what he could do with computers, and they overlooked the strangeness, the blank spots on the résumé. Eventually, he found employers who saw those things as positive attributes.
Godwin—that was the name on his passport now—found his way to Romania and hooked up with the Boian clan when he reprogrammed a bunch of blank phone cards for them. He made lasting connections. Showed them where the real money was lurking in the dark corners of the Net. And pretty soon they were working for him. He started in identity theft, churning thousands of stolen credit-card numbers before moving into faked prescriptions, then from there into money laundering, which is where the real cash was.
Godwin was careful never to get too big, to become a priority for any of the international law enforcement agencies. They are all busy with the narcoterrorists, the drug lords, the various crime families and their corporate partners. Or they make cosmetic busts of the small players, the incompetents who try to sell a crate of heroin and weapons off the back of a truck to a group of Interpol agents.
Godwin lives in the middle. He services everybody. Accumulates very little. Keeps most of his own money in digital form, in well-secured offshore accounts.
He’s never given up playing with computers. He still visits the message boards, still tinkers with software. He saw the code that Stack posted for encrypted transactions and instantly recognized the potential for his own business. Then he found Stack on the boards, and the two of them began talking about what would become Downvote.
Then he had his grand plan. His big idea. The final score, like they talk about in heist movies. A plan that no one else would see coming, with enough wealth to walk away forever as a reward. For him, it’s not about the money. He has millions. He’s already doing what he wants.
But the plan will prove just how much smarter he is than everyone else. All the governments, the cops and agents who have tried to track him down. Stack. And even me.
I can almost see it. Abruptly, his consciousness shifts.
“Did you get a nice long look inside my head?” he asks.
He’s aware that I’m awake. He doesn’t look up from his cards. He’s not too scared of me, even though I could hurt him in a dozen ways without moving from this table.
I admit: I am impressed, despite everything. Imagine a bar catching fire and a nearly perfect stained-glass window forming out of the melted liquor bottles and wreckage. That’s Godwin. He is, in his own way, a work of art. Battered and tossed around in chaos, yet somehow still complete. He could have collapsed into addiction or escaped into a stable job somewhere in a suburb. Instead, he became a pirate.
Godwin flips the cards over, one after another. He learned to play during his three-month stretch in that Philippine jail all those years ago.
When I don’t answer, he speaks to me again. “You can’t say you weren’t warned. I told you I would get you if you kept coming after me. And I did. I know you better than anyone else.”
“Well, I was unconscious for a while. But I trust you were a gentleman.”
He smiles. “That’s funny.” Now that I can hear him, I see why he’s used the voice-masking software over the phone. His accent is odd and distinctive, a collection of vowel sounds and consonants from every place he’s lived. Australian burr with some Slavic tinge to the vowels, plus a hint of southern drawl in there too. It sticks in the ear. For someone like him, who wants to be anonymous at all cost, it has to be a liability.
“You know what I mean,” he says. “I told you I would be able to handle you. From the very start. Take another look in my mind. See what you can see.”
I do. And I realize why he’s not afraid of me.
He’s taken two precautions. The first is around his wrist. It’s a knockoff fitness tracker that measures Godwin’s pulse and movement. He’s tinkered with the software a little himself. It’s now linked via Bluetooth to a vest he’s wearing under his shirt, which is why he looks a little bulky sitting there.
He’s hooked himself up to a suicide vest. There are twelve small bricks of plastic explosive wrapped around his chest. The detonator is keyed to his pulse and respiration. If his heart stops, the vest explodes—and it’s got enough power to kill everything inside a ten-yard radius.
That’s a pretty good incentive for anyone close to Godwin, like me, to keep him breathing. But he’s got another one too.
I can read his thoughts clearly. He’s got Sara.
The memory is bright and distinct. She is cuffed and gagged, her injured arm pulled painfully behind her while a man holds a gun on her. The man—a hulking thug with a thick beard, one of Godwin’s Romanians—marches her into the building that is across the way from us, disappearing into the dark entrance.
No chance of that now. Godwin got both of us. I don’t sense her thoughts anywhere nearby, but that doesn’t mean much.
“Where is she?” I ask, but Godwin shrugs. I scan deeper, but he honestly doesn’t know. It’s the only way to keep a secret from me: stay ignorant.
“I only know the phone number,” he says, holding up a cell phone. “I gave my friends strict instructions. I suppose you already know what happens if I feel like I have to make that call.”
I do my best to avoid the images and ideas running through his head now. He’s told his men holding Sara to make the same threats to her about me. We’re both being held hostage to guarantee the good behavior of the other.
“How do I know she’s still alive? If you’ve already hurt her, why shouldn’t I just stop your heart and trigger that bomb right now—”
Sighing, Godwin lifts a remote control from the furred surface of the table and clicks a screen on the wall to life.
There is a webcam image of Sara. Like me, she’s tied down with packing straps, pined to a mattress instead of a table. Helpless.
But alive. Or at least
she was when the video was taken. He knows that it will be enough to keep me quiet and polite.
The small hope of rescue I didn’t even realize I had dies inside me. In the back of my mind, I thought that Sara might still come in, guns blazing, and spare us both a lot of trouble and anguish. For once, I thought, there might be an easy way out.
All right. I admit it. He really is pretty smart.
“She came looking for you, you know,” he says conversationally, as if we were discussing the weather. “That’s why she’s here. She tracked your credit cards. Found out you flew to Laos. I had a man following her. I arranged for her to be picked up when she arrived. Cost me about fifty bucks, American.”
I don’t respond to this. He looks up from his cards. “Does that bother you? Knowing that her loyalty to you is what’s going to get her killed?”
I think about that for a moment. “You were so certain that I’m not really human,” I say. “What do you think?”
He shrugs and goes back to his game. “I think that you’d like to believe you care for her. She’ll serve her purpose. So will you. That’s enough for me.”
He doesn’t look up from the cards as he says this. He and Stack are like distorted mirror images of each other. Stack has internalized all of his pain, used it to lash himself into a contorted position where he cannot eat half of a protein bar without feeling guilt.
Godwin, on the other hand, wears his misery like spikes, and lets other people impale themselves when they bump up against him.
I’ve been threatened by a lot of people. It comes with the job. But as uncomfortable as it is to admit, Godwin creeps me the hell out. He moves with the deliberate pace of a spider on a web. I know he’d kill me without a second thought if he could.
But he can’t. Not yet anyway.
“Why don’t you just get it over with?” I ask.
He doesn’t answer, but he can’t stop the response that bubbles up in his brain.
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