“Mailin, please.”
“NO, Eve, I don’t. And even if I did, there’s no way I could – ”
“Do you know somebody who knows somebody, then? You’re all hackers – you’re all on the same team – you must cross paths at some point!”
Mailin is silent. I can see the wheels spinning, though he’s trying to hide it.
“Mailin, please!”
He grits his teeth. “I know a guy in the anti-terrorism division at the Bureau… and he might know somebody in the NSA’s anti-terrorism division – but – ”
“Please, Mailin, please,” I whisper. “It’s our only shot.”
“Eve,” he whispers back, “this could put me in jail. At the very least, it could make me the FBI’s slave until I die.”
“You’re using the information to track down somebody who killed two of your fellow agents, and who’s about to kill an American citizen.”
“But – ”
“Mailin, I wouldn’t ask you unless the situation was dire, and it’s as dire as it fucking gets. I am out of options. I can’t do this, and Grant is going to die.” Tears well up and spill down my cheeks. “Please, I’m begging you.”
Mailin gets a look on his face like he’s in agony… and then he pulls out his cell phone. “Jesus Christ, I cannot believe I am about to do this…”
I squeeze his arm. “Thank you!”
“It’s not necessarily going to get us anywhere,” he warns me. “My friend might say no.”
“It’s a chance. And right now, I’ll take any chance I can get. Thank you, thank you, thank you!”
“You can thank me from the next jail cell over when we’re doing 20 years in Leavenworth,” he gripes as he dials the number.
84
Two things happen in parallel.
The first thing is we land at Marin County Airport. Duplass must have pulled out all the stops with his FBI credentials, because there’s a black limousine waiting for us at the gate as we taxi in. I personally am overjoyed, because the limo has a high-powered wifi connection. I basically log off from the plane and log on seamlessly to the limo during the thirty steps it takes to get to the car.
The limo has one of those ‘everybody faces everybody else’ style of backseats. Duplass, Mailin, and I sit on one side, and JP and Dominique sit on the other. I keep the backpack at my feet.
I have to give it to Dominique: she takes one for the team and distracts Duplass as much as she can. They’re sitting directly across from each other, and she puts her all into, even going so far as to undo a couple more buttons on her blouse. Despite all his earlier objections about her being a criminal, Duplass certainly isn’t above ogling her breasts.
A retractable barrier is up between us and the driver, so he can’t see or hear what’s going on. Once we give him the address over an intercom, we take off at high speed for Tomales Bay.
The second thing that happens in parallel is, by the time we’re in the limo, Mailin has gotten us into the NSA.
Long story short: Mailin’s FBI hacker friend knows an NSA hacker guy. Mailin tells the FBI guy that he’s tracking Grant, and it appears Grant might be mixed up in terrorism. (Because that’s the only thing an FBI terrorism hacker cares about.) Something big is about to go down, they don’t have any proof, but it’s extremely time-sensitive. Basically your average Kiefer Sutherland 24 ticking time bomb scenario… or it could all be nothing.
After a lot of back and forth, FBI guy contacts NSA guy, and with strict promises not to abuse the information (which we, unfortunately, immediately abuse), we now have a backdoor entry into the NSA.
Holy shit.
I’m inside the NSA.
This is like a Soviet Spy being inside the White House circa 1962.
Holy shiiiiiit.
But I don’t do any sightseeing. I immediately zip around the network until I find the NSA uplink to Tomales Bay… and then, just like that, I’m in.
HOLY SHIT.
There are a few security protocols, but Epicurus obviously doesn’t think anybody at the NSA is going to hack him, so his protections are minimal.
By the time the limo drives off, I’m inside the belly of the beast.
I immediately start tooling around Epicurus’s network until I find what I’m looking for: the security system. From there, I can access hundreds of surveillance cameras on the estate.
There are dozens of camera feeds from inside the house itself, which looks more like Versailles than anything a normal millionaire might build.
There are another fifty-plus feeds from other buildings, which range from guest houses to some kind of tech lab to a garage full of exotic and very expensive cars.
Then there are the cameras around the airfield.
I bring up one feed from the airplane hangar that is centered right on the parked jet, and I gasp.
Bruised and bloody, Grant is stripped down to his boxers. He kneels on the tarmac with his arms handcuffed behind him. Surrounding him are a half-dozen men with assault rifles.
“Oh shit,” Mailin mutters.
“What?” Duplass asks, and leans over Mailin to get a look. “Oh my God…”
“Is that confirmation enough for you?” I seethe, tears welling up in my eyes.
“Yeah… that’ll do,” Duplass says distractedly, and pulls out his cell phone as he continues to stare at the screen.
“What? What is it?” JP asks.
I turn the computer screen around for them to look. Dominique cries out and starts weeping; JP just sits there in shock, like somebody’s punched the wind out of him.
“There is someone coming,” Dominique says through her tears.
I turn the laptop around in time to see a car approaching in the frame. A black Rolls Royce pulls right up in front of the jet.
My stomach tightens.
This is it. Epicurus is going to show himself.
The back door opens, and a man gets out – medium height, solidly built, and white, just like Grant had described from his encounter in Bel Air.
But this time, we can see his face.
His features are slightly puffy, as though he’s packing a few pounds. He has thinning hair, rimless spectacles, a thin beard along the line of his jaw, and a hooked nose.
It’s been almost two decades since anybody’s taken a picture of him, but he’s still instantly recognizable.
“Holy shit,” I murmur.
“Jesus fucking Christ,” Mailin hisses.
“Oh my God, no,” Duplass moans.
“What?” JP asks insistently, and leans across the aisle to see.
“Qui est-ce?” Dominique asks, her brow furrowed as she tries to do the same.
“It’s Dieter Lassenbach,” I say.
There is a long silence from my two French companions.
Then JP asks, “Who the fuck is Dieter Lassenbach?”
85
Basically everybody in the world knows a few tech titans. For instance, Bill Gates. Mark Zuckerberg. Steve Jobs. Everybody knows them. You probably know Michael Dell, too, because his name is on 10% of all the computers sold every year in the U.S.
Down a level are other billionaires and captains of industry – a little less well-known to the average American, but if you read the news regularly, you know who they are. Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon.com. Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the creators of Google. Elon Musk, co-founder of Paypal and the CEO of Tesla Motors. Tim Cook, CEO of Apple. Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle and one of the richest men in the world.
But do you know who Pierre Omidyar is? He founded eBay. How about Satya Nadella, current CEO of Microsoft? Or Jack Ma, the Asian businessman who started Alibaba, ‘the Chinese Amazon’ that’s worth over $150 billion?
Unless you work in tech, journalism, or the stock market, I’ll bet you’ve never even heard of Reed Hastings, Peter Thiel, Jack Dorsey, Marc Andreessen, Ma Huateng, Ginni Rometty, Robin Li, David Karp, or Travis Kalanick. And those people are basically world famous. They’ve given you ev
erything from Netflix to Tumblr to Uber.
How many other billionaires and multimillionaires are out there that you’ve never heard of? People who invented things you use every day, and yet you couldn’t name them if your life depended on it?
That’s Dieter Lassenbach.
86
Dieter Lassenbach is famous among techies for being a recluse. He’s sort of the J.D. Salinger of tech gods.
He’s also infamous for being something of an evil genius… but I don’t think anybody would have pegged him as a serial killer. Which means he has the perfect cover.
As teenage hackers, Mailin and I knew him as one of the legendary antiheroes of the internet. And that was more than a decade after he’d done most of his damage.
Dieter was the only son of immigrants who escaped to the U.S. from East Germany back during the Cold War. A child prodigy and college dropout, he was also one of the first guys to deal in encryption for banking transactions back in the 1990’s. He sold his company for hundreds of millions when he was in his mid-twenties.
During the dot.com bubble era, he was known as a tech Nostradamus who could spot an intriguing startup in its early stages. He’d make an insanely low offer for 51% of the stock, and when he was rebuffed, he would then reverse-engineer the company’s product and just destroy it in the press. Run simulations to show every weakness and why it was a piece of shit. Once the company was gutted, humiliated, and on the verge of bankruptcy, Dieter would swoop in, buy it for pennies on the dollar, and then ‘fix’ all the problems, turn around and sell it in an IPO, and walk away with billions. If you were a company approached by Dieter Lassenbach in 1999, you either sold to him quickly, or you spent months wondering when you’d finally have to drop your shorts and bend over.
He was a complete and total bastard. He was very, very good at it. And he got obscenely rich doing it.
He was also already going down the J.D. Salinger route at that point. By 2000, he no longer allowed himself to be photographed. He supposedly spent all his time holed up in various secluded estates across the world. Fiji, Thailand, the Peruvian Andes, Switzerland… no one knew for sure.
When the dot.com bubble crashed, he disappeared for good.
Except there were always rumors.
One of the most persistent was that after 9/11, the U.S. government tapped him to help with the growing surveillance state they were building. They wanted to keep America safe, so who better to help them than the preeminent enfant terrible of the tech world?
Nobody knew that for sure, though. For the rest of us, Dieter just… vanished. The end result was that he became something of a Keyser Söze figure. You know, out of The Usual Suspects? “The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist”? He became a boogeyman, a joke to tell your fellow hackers: Cover your tracks, or Dieter’ll get ya. For a while, rumors circulated on the hacking forums that Dieter had somehow predicted the stock market crash in 2008, bet hundreds of millions against the U.S. economy, and made tens of billions more – sort of like Steve Carell and Ryan Gosling in The Big Short. Come to think of it, given his NSA connections and the fact that he could have hacked anybody’s emails before Edward Snowden blew the whistle, those rumors aren’t entirely impossible.
The NSA probably didn’t hire Dieter outright back in 2001. Billionaires don’t work for government-level paychecks, even out of civic duty. The newly-formed Department of Homeland Security probably paid him obscene amounts as a consultant or independent contractor, sort of like the Department of Defense does with Boeing and Raytheon. Money probably wasn’t the only inducement. If Dieter wanted power while remaining totally anonymous, the NSA was the perfect way to get it. They basically served it up to him on a silver platter.
If all that is true – and I have no way of knowing if it is – there’s a sick joke there, darker than gallows humor. The NSA obviously didn’t know they’d hired a serial killer, but they knew Dieter was a Great White Shark. They just thought he was their Great White Shark. They put him on a leash and expected him to go eat foreign terrorists (which I’m sure he did, and probably quite well). They didn’t realize that the leash was an illusion, and they sure as hell didn’t expect him to attack the locals, much less use the NSA’s resources to do it.
But that’s apparently what he did – until Grant found two women locked up in a house in Bel Air.
Then the Great White Shark went on a rampage. I’d narrowly escaped alive – but it was looking like Grant might not be so lucky.
87
I try to explain all this to JP and Dominique in as few words as possible. “He’s a hacking legend, but you’ve never heard of him.”
“Obviously,” JP snorts.
I glance over at Duplass. He looks white as a ghost.
“How do you know who he is?” I ask.
Duplass gives me a hard, icy stare. “That’s classified.”
Holy shit.
Duplass knows who Dieter is and who he works for.
“You have to call the team now,” I insist.
Duplass looks at the screen again and shakes his head slowly. “I… don’t think that’s a good idea.”
Everybody in the car turns to stare at him at the same time.
“WHAT?!” I scream.
Both JP and Dominique start babbling in French.
“I can’t use this in this court,” Duplass says. “How did you even hack into his property?”
“Never mind that! You said you were going to call the backup team once we have confirmation – well, here’s confirmation!”
“No – no,” he says, and I can tell he’s freaking out inwardly. It’s strange to see such a commanding asshole suddenly lose his nerve and become a rubbery wimp. “We need to do this through the proper channels – we need to get a warrant first – ”
“Fuck the warrant! They’re going to kill Grant!”
Duplass points at the laptop screen. “This was illegally obtained – ”
“If you’d landed the plane right behind them when I told you to, none of this would be an issue!” I shout.
“We needed probable cause.”
“GRANT GETTING KIDNAPPED WAS THE PROBABLE CAUSE! We were tracking him! You just don’t want to do it now because you know who Dieter is, and you know this is going to cause a shitstorm in Washington, and you’re too much of a pussy to do the right thing!”
“We need a warrant,” Duplass keeps repeating like it’s some sort of magical mantra. “We need a warrant.”
After all the hoops we jumped through, after following all his rules, Duplass is losing his nerve at the finish line – and Grant is going to pay the price.
I’m about to rip Duplass a new asshole when Mailin points at the screen. “Dieter is talking – do you have audio on that thing?”
I look at the laptop. Holy shit, sure enough, Epicurus/Dieter is walking over in front of Grant and his lips are moving.
I click through the buttons on the camera interface, and suddenly we can hear voices.
88
“Grant Carlson… we meet again.”
Dieter’s real voice is different from Epicurus’s. The main difference is it’s higher pitched. He must have used audio manipulation software, both to disguise his voice and to make it sound more threatening. But the rhythms are the same, and the slight European accent is the same.
Grant laughs for several seconds, the kind of laugh when you realize the universe has played a dirty trick on you. Then he shakes his head wearily. “Hello, Dieter.”
Wait –
What?!
“Grant knows who this guy is?!” Mailin asks, floored.
Everybody, including Duplass, tries to crowd around the monitor.
“How’s the house working out for you?” Grant continues.
Holy shit.
“He must have designed Dieter’s house,” I mutter.
“Magnificently. Even better than the mansion you designed for Erickson.”
“Who’s Eri
ckson?” Duplass demands, but Grant answers the question for us.
“Then why’d you have to go and burn it down? I liked that house.”
“I liked it, too. All those lovely, hidden rooms… simply perfect for my great works. That’s why I was renting it, you know. Because you made it.”
Jesus. Dieter/Epicurus was a former client – and had specifically sought out another one of Grant’s houses for his killing grounds.
“You’re my favorite architect of all time,” Dieter continues. “Lloyd Wright, Gehry, I.M. Pei…they all pale in comparison to your genius.”
“Yeah, they tend not to put in torture rooms for sick fucks,” Grant says flippantly. “I did it unintentionally, you know, but… oh well.”
Dieter stiffens. He’s pissed. “I was giving you a great compliment.”
“Yeah? Well, keep ‘em comin’, then. What about Michaelangelo?” Grant asks cheekily. “Does he pale in comparison to my genius, too?”
“You think you’re being clever, don’t you?”
Grant continues like he’s talking to himself, totally ignoring Dieter. “Naaah, Mikey probably didn’t put in torture rooms for sick fucks, either…”
Out of nowhere, Dieter slaps Grant across the face. Hard.
Everyone around me gasps.
I just want to kill the motherfucker.
Dieter waits for a second, then slowly addresses Grant. “You have no idea what I am. You have no idea what I have become. I have escaped your pitiful, narrow definition of what it is to be human. I have transcended… I have become something else entirely.
“I thought you might recognize that – because I sensed a kindred spirit in your work. ‘Mon hypocrite lectuer, mon semblable, mon frère.’ You grapple with genius. Your designs are outside of time, outside of space. Eternity is your métier.
“I, too, work in the Eternal, but my designs are flesh and blood. Transient… fleeting… ephemeral. And because of that, they are all the more precious. I thought I might be able to persuade you to join me. That you might find a kindred soul in me as well, and together we could create a paradise the likes of which no one has seen since the dawn of man. I think now, though, that I was wrong.”
The Billionaire's Redemption (The Billionaire's Kiss, Book Five): (A Billionaire Alpha Romance) Page 23