Fall; or, Dodge in Hell - Neal Stephenson Page 0,54

matters to her clients, who had overheard enough to be curious.

“I’m here,” she assured him.

“Maeve? There’s a lot more we could say to each other,” Corvallis said, “but I’m betting that the Joneses have friends and family who know they were in Moab this morning and who are frantic with worry right now. You should probably hang up and call them.”

“Why haven’t they called already, I wonder?”

“They probably don’t have the sat phone number. To get the sat phone number, they’d have to reach your main office, and . . .”

“And all the comms are down, yeah. All right. How can I call you back, Corvallis?”

He gave her his number, and she recited it back to him, using the quasi-military “niner” in place of “nine,” which he found unaccountably confidence inspiring. Then she hung up without formalities.

While all of this had been going on, Jason Crabb had emailed him back to tell him what he already knew, namely that the communications blackout in Moab appeared to be the result of a conventional DDoS attack.

Corvallis called Laurynas, his boss, the fifty-ninth-richest man in the world, who answered the phone with “Don’t sell any of your stock.”

“Huh?”

“After the stock market reopens, that is. Legal’s sending out a company-wide blast.”

It took Corvallis a few seconds to catch up with the logic. “You know the Moab event is a hoax.”

“Yeah. It is becoming increasingly obvious.”

“You’re worried it’s going to be a bloodbath for our stock. Because so much of it is happening on our network. We look negligent. People will sue us.”

“But for now that is insider knowledge, C, and if you sell any of your stock, you are insider trading.”

“Got it.”

“Where are you, man? Other than on a plane.”

“Headed for Moab.”

Laurynas laughed. Corvallis had the sense it was the first time he had laughed all day. “No shit?”

“When I got suspicious I asked the pilots to plot a new course.”

“That is awesome.” Laurynas was ten years younger than him. “You going to try to land at Moab?”

“Probably not. No real plan yet.”

“You’re just calling an audible. That. Is. Awesome!”

“Thanks.”

“When did you first get suspicious, C?”

“At a subconscious level? It was all that shit about the Moabites.”

“What are you talking about?”

“In the video from the terrorists, where they take responsibility for the attack?”

“Yeah. It’s a pretty long sermon,” Laurynas said, a little defensively. “I didn’t have time to sit through the whole thing.”

“He quotes a lot of Old Testament crap about the ancient Moabites and how they were apparently the bad guys. Born of incest or something.”

“As if that justifies the attack on Moab, Utah.”

“Yeah, and on one level I’m thinking it sounds like the usual convoluted jihad-think but at the same time I’m like, ‘Come on, man, you could have nuked any old town you chose, and most would be easier to reach than Moab.’ I mean, why even bother with a warning shot?”

“They were trying too hard,” said Laurynas, getting it. “Piling on a lot of verbiage to explain why they picked that town.”

“Yeah. As if they were worried that people would see through it. When the real reason’s obvious.”

“Yeah. If they did a nuke hoax in Paterson, New Jersey, people in the next town over would just check it out with fucking binoculars and say, ‘Nope, still there.’ It had to be somewhere isolated.”

“It’s the key to the whole plan,” Corvallis said.

“Yeah, it sets up the red-eye flight, the truck driver, and the rest. These guys are good.”

“So if I were you, with the resources you’ve got, I’d be digging into the fake footage, the burn victims . . .”

“We found some metadata suggesting it came out of a Nollywood special effects house.”

“You mean Bollywood?”

“Nollywood. November. Not Bravo. Nigerian film industry. Huge.”

“Jeez, why is it always Nigeria?”

“It isn’t,” Laurynas said flatly. “This is classic misdirection. Whoever did this knows that, when it comes to light, people will focus way too much attention on the Nigeria angle.”

“Well, so what do you want me to do?” Corvallis asked, after they had both sat there quietly pondering Nigeria for some moments.

“Save the company.”

“And how do you think I might achieve that?”

“By getting to Moab before the president of the United States gets there. Or, barring that, soon.”

“How does that save the company?”

“When people understand that this is a hoax, burning feces are going to fall out of the sky and bury us to a depth of six Empire State Buildings,” Laurynas said. “The best we can do is spread the blame—point out that all