Agents of the Internet Apocalypse

by Wayne Gladstone

  And then I heard a shot from behind me. I turned to find its location, but saw nothing aside from a helicopter flying away, and when I turned around, Romaya was on the ground, blood dripping from her mouth, breathing in spasms.

  I held her head in my hands. “I’ll get help!”

  She grabbed both my lapels hard enough to keep me with her. She knew no ambulance would come in time. Instead, while she still could, she reached inside my jacket and pulled out the letter and held it to her chest as hard as she could before her head fell back to the ground.

  “Babe!” I screamed into her face, but my voice bounced uselessly off the concrete around her. I held her until I felt my knees get wet. My bloody love letter clutched to her heart. Then I realized the blood was fresh. Wet. Her blood. And when I pulled it from her fingers I saw she’d grabbed the letter from the New York disability board. My love letter was still in my pocket. I sat there holding her. Everything in the darkness, wet with blood and tears, and at some point the life we created must have died inside her too.

  12.

  When I awoke, Romaya was gone, and I was in the back of Quiff’s limo again. My clothes were still wet and filthy, but the Internet phone book was by my side. Quiff sat across from me in a Groucho Marx mask.

  “I wish you’d called me sooner,” he said, and then I remembered. After enough time had passed and I’d become as soaked as I could with Romaya, I’d managed to make my way into her apartment so I could call the number Quiff had given me days before. I let him know where I was, that I had the Internet phone book, and I asked him to come get me. Most of all, I insisted he bring an army.

  Quiff could see me recovering the past. “You passed out from exhaustion nearly the moment we came,” he said. “You’ve been through a lot. And without much sleep it seems.” He paused and then added, “I’m sorry about Romaya.”

  “Where is she?” I looked out the window and saw we were no longer in Brentwood.

  “We called the shooting into the police. I’m sure they have … her now. Again, I’m sorry.”

  It only took a moment of being awake to regather my focus and anger. “It was him,” I said. “It was Hamilton Burke. We have to kill him.”

  “Hold on,” Quiff said. “How do you know it was Burke?”

  “He’s here. In the book!”

  I tossed the Internet phone book onto Quiff’s lap and he started flipping the pages.

  “Y’know, Gladstone,” he said, “there’s more than just one name in here. Did you even bother to read past the first page?”

  “I didn’t need to, did I? It’s him. He tried to kill me, but when I dropped to one knee to propose to Romaya, he shot her by mistake. Or one of his assassins did, I mean. Listen to me. I don’t care about the Net. I just want him dead.”

  “This is the same Gladstone who wasn’t looking for war? The Gladstone who believed in ‘pure things’?”

  “Well, things have changed,” I said. “He killed Romaya. I want him dead.”

  “You want one of the most successful, powerful, and richest men in the world dead?”

  “Yes!”

  “Well, I’m not sure I can help you there, Gladstone.”

  “Why? You want to bring him down from the inside? Do all your Anonymous computer-hacking bullshit? Without the Internet? You said you had an army!”

  “I do have an army, Gladstone. You have no idea. But I just can’t go ahead with your plan.”

  “Why not?”

  Quiff dropped his head down almost to his knees, until I could see the seam at the back of his mask. He grasped the rubber at the top and pulled it forward off his face before looking up at me with a smile.

  “It’s nice to see you again, Wayne,” he said.

  It was Hamilton Burke. The same man from New York. The same man from the Playboy Mansion. It was Hamilton Burke. Sitting with me. Talking with me.

  “What have you done to Quiff?” I asked, and he frowned with impossible disappointment until I understood.

  “There is no Quiff?” I asked. “It’s always been you?”

  “Right.”

  “In New York, in California, always?”

  “Correct.” He paused and leaned in a little closer, speaking in a needless half whisper. “I like to know what’s going on,” he said. “Anonymous? If there’s gonna be an antiestablishment, well then you know the establishment better be part of it. You can never have too much information.”

  He paused for emphasis. “I’ve always found, well, people who only know part of the story make poor choices. Don’t you agree?”

  Hamilton had seen me drunk and crazy. He’d seen me sober and insecure. But he had no way to predict what I’d do next. I launched forward in my seat and grabbed tight and quick at his throat, banging his head up against the glass that divided us from the front. Before I could bash his head a second time, the glass lowered and one of his masked goons leaned forward over Hamilton’s shoulder, sticking the barrel of a gun in my face. He didn’t wait for me to release Hamilton. He just jabbed the side of the revolver into my forehead, sending me backwards and bloody into my seat.

  “Come now, Wayne. Did you think I would leave myself exposed the moment after telling you who I was?” Hamilton asked. “I’m fucking Hamilton Burke. I didn’t inherit this position from my dad, y’know?”

  “Fuck you,” I said, holding my head.

  “Look, you’re upset. That’s understandable. Tell you what: I’m going to raise this glass again so we can talk without these ruffians. But make no mistake, they can see through their side and their guns are pointed at you.”

  Hamilton looked at me while I tried to remember everything I had confided in him when I thought he was a friend. Then he poured himself a drink from the decanter he didn’t let me touch the last time I was in this car.

  “Beauté de Siècle by Hennessy,” he said. “Y’know, you really pissed me off when you drank my Scotch that first time. And smoked my Cuban in New York for that matter. For someone who’ll never earn north of $150,000 a year, you sure do have expensive tastes.”

  “Why is it,” I asked, “that the rich are the cheapest fucks alive?”

  Another frown. “Is that what you really want to ask me, Mr. Gladstone? Why don’t you ask me your real question?”

  He was right, and I needed to know, but I was consumed by that feeling of inferiority Hamilton was so good at infusing. “Before I ask,” I said, “will one of your goons shoot me if I pour myself a drink of your expensive Scotch?”

  “Forget about the goons,” Hamilton said. “I won’t let you.”

  “That’s okay,” I said. “I didn’t really want it.”

  “No?” he asked, leaning forward and swirling his drink in its glass.

  “No,” I said, and slapped the drink out of his hand, spilling it onto the floor of his car.

  “Well, you certainly showed me,” he said, pouring himself a new drink as easily as pulling a second tissue from a box of Kleenex.

  “My question, Hamilton, is … why me?”

  He laughed, spritzing the remnants of his drink from his old man’s lips.

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” he said, wiping his mouth, “but that’s not the question I was expecting. That’s the problem with your generation. Everything’s always about you! It’s not. You’re not the important one. I am.” He took a sip of his drink. “I am the establishment. I am the antiestablishment. You think you’re the only would-be Messiah I kept tabs on? You think you’re the only fucking nothing who wants to be a hero? The world is filled with people like you. You’re not the first, second, or last man I constructed stories for and spun in circles.

  “Hell, when the government locked you up and it seemed your buddy Tobey might be my next concern, I took an interest in him too. I’m very interested in anything that can be in my way.”

  Hamilton paused to catch his breath, and in that moment he almost seemed to feel bad for me.

  “Aww, don’t look at me like that,” he said. “Don’t yo
u know I like you? You rose above the other nothings. You started a movement. That’s why I couldn’t just kill you. You’re no good to me as a martyr. You have talents. So many that I really don’t understand how you’ve wasted your life so.”

  “Thanks Hamilton,” I said. “I’ll tell everyone you thought so when I’m pissing on your grave.”

  “That’s no way to talk,” he said. “Do you know how much work I put into you? I didn’t have to go that extra mile. I read your book, I gave you a mission. I commissioned a chopper to bury some treasure for you. That box wasn’t cheap. And how about that lock? Do you know I had a guy fashion a lock for you exactly like the ones you described in your book, on your Fordham law school windows? Just so you could be a hero. Did that make you feel good? And even the letter I planted it under. I thought you’d like that.”

  “I’m not a big Alice Cooper fan,” I said.

  “No, not Cooper. He paid the cash, but he bought the letter in Groucho’s name.” Hamilton held up the mask. “Y’know, because your whole mission’s a joke!”

  I had to hold back tears, not so much because of everything that had happened, but because I had tied my life to someone who wanted me to cry.

  “What?” he said. “I thought you liked jokes, Gladstone.”

  Hamilton could somehow embody both intense disdain and impersonal indifference without a trace of shame. Only my years on comment threads could have prepared me for such a thing.

  “Look on the bright side, Gladstone,” he said. “I taught you some things.”

  “Yeah, stuff like how in these times you can only trust a man in a mask.”

  Hamilton paused and lit a Cuban. “Ah, that. Yeah, well, sorry. Y’see, in some ways that’s true. I mean, with communication, and cookies, and data mining you really can’t be too careful.… But here’s the thing about a man in mask,” he said, exhaling, “and I’m really disappointed you didn’t realize this, but the reason you can’t actually trust a man in a mask is … he’s still wearing a fucking mask!”

  “Sorry I disappointed you, sir.”

  “The only people you can trust are those too weak to hurt you,” he said.

  “Does that mean you trust me?” I asked, but he didn’t answer.

  “Y’know, you might not believe this,” he said, “but I first took down the Net to help men like you. That stuff I told you in New York is true. It’s a rigged game, our system, and I’d won it. Thought it might be nice to go the other way with my remaining years.”

  I was getting cold. My shirt was so wet with blood I started to shiver from the AC. I tried to open the window, but it was locked.

  “Why don’t you just kill me,” I said. “I’m not interested in getting to know you.”

  He continued. “I took down the Net at the hubs,” he said. “You didn’t even ask.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “Did you like taking the Net down at the hubs? Did that finally give you an erection?”

  You can’t hurt a man like Hamilton with facts, and anger is just a sign of weakness.

  “I mean, I owned interests in enough companies to gain access,” he said, ignoring me. “And when you have far too much money to spend in ten lifetimes, it’s easy to bribe people to make things not work. Certain interruptions. I was just playing at first. Disrupting signals at certain points. Rewriting code to send users to the wrong Web sites.”

  “Some people get a dog. Take up fishing.”

  “I just wanted to see if I could do it. And don’t pretend you don’t remember why. You practically memorized every word I said for your little book. The Net screws the working man. It increases a worker’s productivity. But more importantly, it increases the employer’s expectation of productivity. You’re never free. You are always on.”

  “Maybe you just missed sexually harassing the secretary who used to take your dictation.”

  “I’m glad your penis still works, Gladstone, but is that all you want to talk about? I was saying, ultimately, I needed more and more collaborators to keep the world offline. And that was okay, too. I was always good at consensus building, but that’s not important. What’s important was the moment I saw I could take it down, I saw an angle. I didn’t invent the most important technology of the twenty-first century, but if I could be the one to bring it back—well then, that’s almost as good. People would pay for that. People will pay for that. And we can do away with this well-meaning, virtually free, wasted venture, I’ll bring it back on my terms. So y’see, you’re not even needed, Mr. Gladstone. The Net will return with or without you. When the people are ready to receive it in a different way. This Apocalypse is merely a palate cleanser.”

  I looked out the window and saw signs for LAX.

  “Why are we going to the airport, Hamilton?”

  “Because,” he said. “This morning you went to the bank and withdrew the last $3,000 to your name.”

  “Why would I do that?”

  He reached into his robe and pulled out a wad of hundreds and threw them in my lap. “Because you needed the money,” he said. “I’m guessing you thought you’d be leaving the country.”

  “I don’t have a passport.”

  “Don’t you?” he asked, and threw one on my lap to go with with cash. “Smart guy like you would want to take care of everything before murdering his estranged wife.”

  Now the affability was gone. Hamilton was no longer privately amused by his cutting, witty banter. He was showing me who he was. He was revealing the full absence of rules or conscience that would prevent lesser men from visiting full evil upon their enemies.

  “You went to see your wife, Gladstone. She’s dead now. You left the scene without even calling the police. Your two best friends in the world, Tobey and Jeeves? They’re in custody. And do you know what the government will find when they investigate those bombings further? They’ll trace them back to the Internet Reclamation Movement.”

  “Tobey wouldn’t do that.”

  “Tobey doesn’t sweat the details like you, and he has no idea what was done on his watch. Besides, I’m not just talking about the Farmers Market. Personally, I think the government has a much better case against your friends for the Hollywood sign.”

  “Trespassing.”

  “No, they blew up the ‘D’ last night after scrawling Messiah graffiti all over the other letters. You probably haven’t heard the news yet.”

  I remembered the fire I’d seen after my fall down the mountain.

  “Face it: You have blood on your hands, Mr. Gladstone. Literally. Look at you. Is this what good men look like? Are they covered in the blood of their dead wife? Are their best friends held as persons of interest by the government? Do they have absolutely no income—not even the disability they sucked down like a parasite for years? Are they all alone on the wrong side of their country? This is what you get believing in pure things. Nothing. Because nothing is pure. Not even you, Mr. Gladstone, and it’s time for you to go.”

  The car pulled over to the taxi stand and Hamilton threw open the door.

  “Any last words?” Hamilton asked.

  I couldn’t speak. I was afraid if I opened my mouth I’d vomit, even though my throat felt as clamped as my stomach. How could I really be sitting with the most powerful man in the world, and how could he really have conspired to destroy me?

  “Is this really happening?” I asked.

  “So many questions, Mr. Gladstone, but not the right one. Yes, this is really happening,” he answered.

  “It’s not just another delusion?”

  “What do you mean?” he asked, cautiously optimistic.

  “I haven’t gone to therapy. I haven’t taken my pills. I haven’t been sleeping.…”

  “What are you asking me, Mr. Gladstone?” He was almost there.

  “Is everything all right? Is Romaya alive? Is the world still the world?”

  “How could that be?” he asked. “What are you asking?”

  I stared into his blue eyes. No mask. Nothing block
ing me from who he was. “Tell me I’m just crazy,” I begged.

  Only then did Hamilton release his full smile. “Sorry, Mr. Gladstone,” he said. “Not this time.”

  Epilogue

  EXCERPT FROM THE REPORTS OF

  FORMER SPECIAL AGENT

  AARON N. ROWSDOWER

  LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA

  Life has no shortage of rough edges and cruel angles. It’s virtually impossible to navigate the twists and turns without getting cut eventually. Usually, these minor insults and traumas heal. Sometimes they don’t. Not fully anyway. And if you accumulate enough scar tissue, you can stop working the way you’re supposed to. You break.

  They say what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, and I guess for some, that’s true. After all, pain makes you flinch. Your fingers form a fist, and that fist can become tighter and harder with each indignity suffered. Eventually, that fist might even get strong enough to punch down walls. But if you need your hand for something other than violence, if you want to unfurl those fingers to caress a loved one or comfort someone in need, and can’t, well then, you’re broken.

  I met so many men like that when I was an agent, and you can learn a lot from what breaks a man in the same way studying a gunshot wound can tell you all about the weapon and how it was fired. For example, they may say a woman was shot to death at close range by an angry ex-husband, but any examiner worth his salt will write a report that shows it was a rifle shot from a distance. You can study the bullet’s trajectory, seeing how it tore through the left ventricle and exited the spine by T12 to determine it was fired from a high angle. You can divine all of that from examining the victim. And even if that report is lost and the body is then cremated, it doesn’t change the truth.

  It has been two months, one week, and six days since anyone has last seen him. Almost the same amount of time the United States government has no longer needed my services. I could complain more, but I’ll save that for a blog for when the Net comes back. I suppose I could look for a new job. A new career. Security. Consulting. Hell, maybe I’ll even put that J.D. to use and take the bar. But these days it seems to me the only thing I should be looking for is Gladstone, the unknown man who ended up with too many names. Internet Messiah, The Meme-Siah, murderer, terrorist. But I’ll go with just Gladstone because nothing’s quite sticking yet to this inkblot man.