Fatal Error rj-13 Read online

  "Just in case there are a few people who haven't heard it explained by now, what exactly does it mean to dissimilate?"

  Kewan had been coached on how to answer FAQs about Kickers, and this was one of them.

  "It's Hank Thompson's own word for the opposite of assimilate. As everybody grows up, they're pushed into being absorbed by the society or culture or religion or just the plain old herd around them. But when you're an adult, it's time to break free, to throw off the chains of assimilation and dissimilate."

  "But critics say that by joining the Kicker Evolution you've simply traded one group for another."

  "To anyone still assimilated, it might look like that, but you can't understand dissimilation until you've experienced it."

  "But-"

  "I ain't here to argue."

  "I understand. What did you do before you were… before you dissimilated?"

  "Life before dissimilation doesn't matter. Whatever you did, whoever you were, it's all irrelevant. As we like to say, 'You get a clean slate when you dissimilate.' " He spread the web between his right thumb and forefinger. "You also get one of these."

  Pelham squinted at the black tattoo on the dark brown skin. "Oh, yes. That's certainly a familiar figure."

  Should be, Kewan thought. It's been spray-painted all over town.

  But he laughed and said, "Maybe I should get mine outlined in white."

  "That would be… different." Pelham cleared his throat. "All right then, let's get to the here and now: Why are dozens of Kickers out here on this chilly winter night picketing a closed building?"

  Kewan winked. "Well, for one, football season is over."

  Pelham laughed. "Seriously."

  "What time you got?"

  A glance at his watch. "Ten fifty-eight."

  Okay. Two minutes left-if the car was on time.

  Kewan stepped back around the corner and pointed to the building.

  "A major Internet data center hides on the fourth floor there. Big fat fiber-optic cables run in and out of it, feeding the World Wide Web in this country and crossing the Atlantic. We want that stopped."

  "But why?"

  "Because the Internet is the biggest assimilator of all. It sucks people in and won't let them out. So many more people would be able to dissimilate if not for the Internet. That's why we protest."

  "But on a Monday night?"

  "Why not? The Internet runs twenty-four/seven, and so does the Kicker Evolution."

  And… that's when building security is at its lowest.

  He eyed the marchers. They'd moved away from the doors and laid down their signs. He heard a roar of a car engine and saw a beat-up old Chevy speeding up Eighth Avenue from Greenwich Village. Its tires squealed as it braked into a hard left turn mid block, jumped the curb, and barreled across the sidewalk to smash through the glass doors.

  Right on time.

  "Oops!" Kewan broke into a run. "Gotta go."

  The marchers had the car open by the time he got there. Most were hauling long- and short-handle sledgehammers, pry bars, and axes from the trunk; a few others who'd been trained in their use were easing the three EMP generators from the backseat. Kewan grabbed a long splitting maul and charged into the glass-littered lobby where a red-faced security guard was being tied to his chair with plastic fasteners.

  The rest of the Kickers crammed into the two elevators. Kewan pulled out the insider's security card and swiped it through the scanner, then pressed 4. He jumped out, then entered the second elevator with the EMP crew and repeated the process.

  "Remember," he said as they rose. "No hesitation. Soon as we arrive, we open the doors and go after them. Only a few nerdy techs inside this time of night, so don't worry about resistance. Take the routers and servers down hard and the nerds down gentle. The boss don't want nobody hurt. It's bad press."

  One of the guys with an EMP gun snickered. "Yeah, we'll get enough of that when nobody around here can check their Facebook or MySpace tonight."

  Another laughed. "Kicker Man will be defriended all over town."

  The Kicker Man had his own MySpace page with a strange assortment of friends. Yeah, a lot of people would be pissed, but that was the whole idea-gather them together to split them apart.

  "And remember: Don't cut the cables, hammer them."

  A cut cable was easy to fix. Hammering fractured the fibers inside with no clue as to where they were broken.

  The car slowed and dinged for the fourth floor. The doors opened, revealing the first group massed and waiting outside the steel doors to the data center. Kewan swiped the card again and the doors opened.

  He stayed back with the EMP guys while the others charged into the center. He pulled a sheet of paper from his back pocket and unfolded it to reveal a map of the center. Their insider had sketched it out for tonight's visit.

  The commotion drew some nerdy-looking guys to the front. One look at the invaders and they fled toward the rear.

  "Okay, everybody! You know what to do! You see anyone on a phone, stop 'em!"

  He led one of the EMP guys along the course laid out for him. The place was nothing like what he'd expected. In the movies computer centers were always brightly lit, high-tech palaces. This was dingy and dusty and not much more than stacks of black boxes on racks.

  He headed for the routers that fed the high-capacity fiber-optic backbone cable that snaked across the floor of the Atlantic to England. He'd been briefed on what he'd find and given all sorts of names and abbreviations for the equipment, but he'd stopped listening after a while.

  All he needed to know was that the equipment in the room in question had to be destroyed. His fellow Kickers would be smashing or frying every router and server and hammering every cable they could find, but Kewan had been assigned to the heart of the beast. His job was to pierce that heart and stop its beat.

  TUESDAY

  1

  "What are they thinking?" Jack said as he stared at the headline of the Post.

  KICK 'EM IN JAIL!

  Abe shrugged. "I should know? I should explain the doings of meshuga Kickers?"

  Jack leaned on the customer side of the scarred counter at the rear of the Isher Sports Shop. Abe Grossman perched his egg-shaped body on the stool across from him, perusing his array of morning newspapers as he munched one of the bialys Jack had brought. Bits of onion decorated his white shirt and shiny black pants.

  "It was rhetorical."

  "Rhetorical implies you know the answer already."

  "Whatever. I don't know much about the Internet, but I do know it's redundant as all hell. You can't bring it down by attacking a data center."

  "But you can cause much tsuris for those who depend on that center. They still haven't restored service. They've had effects overseas as well, on the far end of that transatlantic cable they damaged."

  "But they will get it up and running again-the TV says by the end of the day if not earlier. So what have they accomplished?"

  "Annoyance, bad press." Abe looked over his reading glasses at Jack. "You've met Hank Thompson. You've dealt with him. He's a shmegegi?"

  "Anything but."

  Jack knew Thompson's felonious history-a high school dropout into grand theft auto. Might be uneducated, but he was no dummy. He'd sat down and written a bestseller that had induced a horde of people to hail him as their fearless leader.

  "I should think there's no method to his madness? The papers say EMP generators were used. That is a little scary."

  Jack had read the papers' explanations of the effects of electromagnetic pulse on delicate circuitry. He didn't understand why or how those waves could do their damage, but he believed. Like he believed in gravity and Britney Spears.

  "I guess if they build one big enough, they'll simply have to drive by a data center and screw it up from outside."

  Abe shook his head. "I don't think that's practical-it would have to be enormous. Better they should use a nuclear explosion."

  "Let's not go there. I
prefer Kickers limiting themselves to something more conventional-like a Tomahawk missile."

  Abe stuffed the rest of the bialy in his mouth and spoke around it. "The question is, why such a problem with the Internet? It's blamed already for fragmenting families and relationships."

  Families… Munir Habib's words echoed through Jack's skull…

  Save my family!

  Abe was saying, "Instead of playing baseball out in the sun with their friends, kids are sitting alone before their monitors. Instead of neighbors shmoozing over a back fence, they're on their computers watching a sit-com episode they missed. Sounds to me already like the Internet is doing Thompson's dissimilating for him."

  Jack tried to visualize Abe leaning on a backyard fence gabbing with a neighbor. But first he had to picture Abe with a backyard. He failed.

  "Yeah. That's what doesn't make sense."

  "Unless he's telling the truth about the attack being perpetrated by non-Kickers trying to make his movement look bad."

  Jack shook his head. "Uh-uh. Those were the real deal."

  "You're so sure how?"

  "They showed a clip from a bystander's cell phone on the morning news."

  Abe's turn to shake his head. "A cell phone. Does nothing go unrecorded these days? Privacy is dying."

  "It's dead and buried. People just don't know it yet. Anyway, I recognized one of the players."

  "From your days in the group?"

  Kewan had bummed more than his share of cigarettes off Jack last summer when he'd been posing as a Kicker.

  Jack nodded. "Yeah. And that means it was an official Kicker operation. They don't do anything without Thompson's say-so. Which brings us back to the original question: What's he thinking?"

  "Maybe it was simply a test run, to see how the EMP gadgets worked."

  "You could go out and buy a server or a router or whatever they were after and test it on that without exposing your plans."

  Abe drummed his fingers. "Maybe he was testing data center vulnerability."

  "Okay. He found that one vulnerable, but that's only going to make other centers beef up their security. Sounds counterproductive to me."

  Abe brushed at the onion bits but succeeded only in smearing them. "To have real success against the Internet, he would need to attack almost every data center and Internet exchange point in the world-and even he, despite his large following, does not have the numbers or resources for that."

  "But even then it would only be temporary, and he'd be in jail and no one would want to dissimilate after that because his name would be mud." Jack pushed the paper away. "I'll think about it later."

  "Something's chewing your guderim. What?"

  He told him about Munir and what he was going through, and how he'd turned him down.

  "You should feel bad about that? Already you helped him. You pointed him toward his company."

  "Yeah, but if he doesn't bring the feds in on it, that's not going to help. He needs lots of eyeballs searching employment records."

  "Which you can't give him, so guilt you shouldn't feel."

  "You're right. A hundred percent right. So why do I feel like I let him down?"

  "Because you've been farblondjet lately."

  If so, Jack figured Gia and Vicky's trip was contributing to it. He glanced at his watch. Almost time for the gathering.

  "Gotta run."

  "Where?"

  "Meeting with the old folks."

  Abe nodded. "Methuselah and his mother. And your old girlfriend too, I suppose."

  "She was never my girlfriend."

  He and Weezy held irregular meetings with the Lady and Veilleur, and one was scheduled for this morning. Maybe they could figure out what the Kickers were up to.

  2

  Munir snatched up the phone on the third ring. The hated voice grated in his ear.

  "You had me a little worried this morning, Mooo-neeer."

  "What? What do you mean?"

  "When you left. Thought you might have been sneaking off to meet someone."

  He must be watching me.

  "I did not!"

  He'd left the apartment for food and newspapers. But he had no appetite and hadn't been able to concentrate long enough to make sense of a single paragraph in the paper. He'd spent his time wandering from room to room, waiting to hear from the monster, wondering what his next demand would be. And all the while his promise of sending proof that Barbara and Robby were still alive gnawed at him. The way he'd said it… even the voice distorter couldn't obscure the obscene glee slithering through his tone.

  "I know that. But it got me to thinking how you might be talking about your situation through email. That's a no-no."

  "I swear I have not!"

  "So you say, but I don't trust you. So I sent you an email. You will open it on both your home computer and your laptop."

  "I don't understand."

  "The email contains a rootkit that will allow me to monitor your activity."

  A rootkit would allow the monster more than that-it would take over his computers.

  Without thinking, Munir blurted, "I can't!"

  "You what?"

  "Wait-wait-wait. I didn't mean that. It's just that the laptop has proprietary data belonging to my company."

  "Are you refusing?"

  Panic squeezed his throat. "No, I don't care about the company. I-"

  "Have you any idea of the consequences?"

  He jumped from his chair and started for his home office.

  "I-I-I'm going to the computer right now. I'll open your email immediately."

  "You've really crossed the line now, you Arab twinkie. You know that proof you wanted about your whore and brat being alive? It's on the way."

  He hung up.

  Munir repressed a scream. He wanted to smash the phone into a thousand pieces but repressed that as well.

  Jack's idea about it being a Saud employee, past or present, ran through his head. A rootkit would allow the monster to take control of his computer and use his passcodes to hack into the company's system. Why would he want to do that unless he was connected to the company? Jack's theory was looking better and better.

  He reached his home computer and checked his mail. There… 911avenger… that had to be him. Munir clicked it open and found a message.

  Leave them running. If anything is encrypted, send the decryption key now.

  With shaking fingers, he complied immediately. Maybe if he showed no hesitation the monster would show mercy. Munir had a terrible feeling about the "proof" that was on the way.

  3

  Claude Fournier met him across the street from the Order's Lodge in Lower Manhattan.

  Eddie had arrived early and had been dismayed by the number of scurvy types dawdling on or about the front steps, smoking in the chill air. Over the years he'd attended a number of meetings in that venerable, granite-block building. Now it looked like some sort of halfway house.

  "What is going on here?" he said as Fournier stopped next to him.

  The man removed the cigarette that had been dangling from his lips and gazed across the street. He didn't look happy at what he saw.

  "Kickers. Didn't you know?"

  "I'd heard talk, but…"

  Fournier was nodding. "Yes. I know. A scruffy bunch."

  Outsiders in one of the Lodges. It wasn't supposed to happen. And yet, here they were.

  "Whose idea was this?"

  "Word came from the High Council last year to give them the run of the place. The High Council would not make that decision lightly. It must see them as useful in some way."

  "Useful how?"

  He gave a typically Gallic shrug. "They have not yet deigned to inform me."

  Eddie was surprised at how offended he felt. And chagrined at how deeply he'd bought into being a brother in the Order.

  "We're not meeting with one of them, are we?"

  "Hardly. An Actuator maintains an office there. It's him we are meeting." He gestured across
the street. "Shall we?"

  Actuator? Eddie thought as he followed Fournier. Why does that sound familiar?

  They crossed the street and headed up the stone steps. The lounging Kickers gave them curious stares but no one challenged them until they stepped through the heavy front doors into the large open foyer.

  "Can I help you guys?" said a bearded heavyset fellow who looked like a biker.

  "We have a meeting."

  "Who with?"

  Appalled by the spectacle of brothers of the Order explaining their presence in a Lodge to an outsider, Eddie wandered deeper into the foyer and stared at the bas relief sigil on the rear wall.

  As a kid, whenever he'd seen it over the door of the Lodge in his hometown, he'd found the pattern vaguely confusing, like an optical illusion. Now he was so used to it-hell, it was seared into the skin on his back-that he found the Mobius-strip quality almost comforting… a promise of eternity… or infinity.

  He noticed a dark smudge or smear on the edge at about seven o'clock. It looked like something had been wiped off. He wondered what.

  Fournier appeared at his shoulder. "The Actuator is in a meeting that is running late. He will see you as soon as he is free. Come with me."

  He led Eddie to a small room furnished with a couple of chairs and nothing else. Their footsteps echoed on the bare hardwood floor.

  "Wait here. It won't be long."

  Eddie walked to the window as Fournier left. He stared out at the street for a moment. Nothing interesting there, so he sat in one of the chairs and tilted it back against the wall. He began rehearsing what he'd planned to say when he noticed a murmur of voices. He looked around and saw the door was closed. So where-?

  A ventilation grille was set in the wall just above the baseboard a few feet away. He leaned closer. That was the source. But where from? Curious, and with nothing else to do, he dropped to a knee and tried to listen.

  4