extremely complicated knot—the famous Gordian knot—that no one could untie. When Alexander learned that whoever solved the knot was destined to rule all of Asia, he simply sliced it with his sword.
This man on sixteen people’s directories was named Alexander Gordius. To anyone lacking Woody’s unique mind, the name would have looked like just another in a long list. But, to him, it seemed unlikely that someone would be named for both the creator of the Gordian knot and the man who solved it with a sword.
To him it looked like a potential false identity.
Woody had been curious enough to want to know more about this Mr. Gordius. Through a back door in the telecom company that carried the account, he initiated a search and discovered that the billing address for Alexander Gordius was a general partnership based in California, which was owned by a limited liability corporation in Delaware . . . and from there the chase took numerous turns.
He had needed a few days to discover that a bewildering variety of corporate entities, behind which Gordius hid, were all connected in one way or another with Refine, Inc., whose parent company was Parable, Inc. Eventually he had squirreled through the back door of the Refine computer system. Once in there, he’d found and penetrated Alexander Gordius’s email files—and discovered that Gordius was actually Dorian Purcell.
To the very exclusive sixteen elites on his directory, Dorian wrote essays identifying serious problems facing humanity—and then proposing solutions. Often controversial solutions. He covered everything from overpopulation to declining population, global warming to global cooling, nuclear-fusion power to the practicality of million-acre solar farms, likely paths to curing cancer, and the possibility of drastically extending the human life span.
Some of what Purcell wrote was intelligent, thoughtful, maybe even doable. However, much of it was as lame as it was pompous. He knew computers and solid-state technology and much related to those fields, but he imagined himself to be an expert on everything. Although Woody had studied and learned a great deal, he was well aware that there were vast areas of knowledge about which he was ignorant and probably always would be. There was only so much time. He knew what he didn’t know. Dorian Purcell, on the other hand, seemed not to know what he didn’t know.
The Alexander Gordius email directory contained the sixteen names Woody already had, but in addition there were three very long email addresses that weren’t names, that were nothing but series of random letters, numbers, and symbols. He understood that these must be sites on the Dark Web. The primary way to acquire one of these closely guarded addresses was from a like-minded individual. Maybe these were sources for drugs or for child pornography; maybe they were online weapons dealers selling illegal stuff like machine guns and C-4 explosives and shoulder-launched surface-to-air missiles.
Woody had hesitated to check out these sites. He had thought about it for days.
Eventually he had chosen one with forty-six characters in the address and had spoofed to it through the Alexander Gordius email account.
He had been greeted by a black screen with one word in white block letters: Tragedy.
A series of quick clips from various TV news programs, both national and local, followed for three or four minutes. There were photographs of people who had died, video of crashed planes strewn across fields and wrecked cars and burning buildings and racing emergency vehicles with flashing lightbars on their roofs, of hospitals and somber police officials in front of microphones and somber doctors in white coats at other microphones. With the images came snippets of audio, the voices of newsreaders and of the grim-faced officials in the clips: “Died in the flash fire following a violent gas-leak explosion . . . committed suicide by hanging himself from a barn rafter . . . perished in a freak accident . . . was killed by a hit-and-run driver . . . a senseless drive-by shooting thought to have been committed by a member of one of the gangs that plague the city . . . a murder-suicide that rocked this upscale community . . . of a sudden massive stroke at the young age of thirty-eight . . . one of three dead in what police believe is a terrorist event, though no one is yet taking credit . . .”
When a photo of Jason Bookman flashed onto the screen, Woody had been so startled that he heard only the last few