pictures on all the screensavers.
Once again, Fred Klein had come through.
71
Granada
Spain
SMITH SLOWED HIS PACE AGAIN, listening to Marty Zellerbach huffing loudly as he crept up the endless set of stairs. Below, the ancient city of Granada stretched into the distance. He kept a watchful eye on the windows in the whitewashed stone buildings on either side of the steps and did his best to turn his face away from the occasional passing pedestrian. So far, things seemed to be going smoothly, but that could all be an illusion. They wouldn’t know they’d been identified until the bullets started flying.
Zellerbach limped up to him, still milking his bullet scrapes, and then stopped in the shade of a fruit tree. The early-afternoon sun had pushed temperatures into the eighties and the forecast was promising another five degrees before sunset.
“You all right, Marty?”
He squinted through the green contacts Randi had spent ten minutes getting into his eyes and scratched like a flea-ridden dog at the fake beard covering much of his face. Combined with the sweat-soaked dress shirt and high-water pants, the disguise gave him a bit of a deranged air.
Not that Smith looked much better. The baseball hat covering his hair had been padded in a way that made his head appear abnormally large and cotton stuffed into his cheeks caused them to bulge noticeably.
An often-ignored fact was that LayerCake constantly attempted to identify people in order to hone its facial recognition software. And while Dresner had been clear that the data collected was immediately purged, it seemed likely that he had the ability to use it for his own purposes. In all likelihood, every Merge on the planet was attempting to find their faces and send a GPS coordinate to their master.
Randi, already at the top of the hill, had gone with her old standby: Muslim. She wore a full headscarf, reflective sunglasses, and a long coat that gave the impression of thirty extra pounds—a configuration that he knew from his own testing confounded the system every time.
“Not much farther, Marty. Five more minutes and we’re there.”
The hacker scowled and gave his beard a few more scratches, but then started forward again. His trophy awaited.
They caught up to Randi on an empty cobblestone street and crossed over to a square lined with outdoor cafés. It was barely noon, so there were only a few scattered customers drinking coffee, reading magazines, and fawning over dogs they were taking a break from walking.
The restaurant they were looking for ran along the back of the square and was the least inhabited. Only three chairs were taken—two by a young couple who could see only each other and the last by a thin, thirty-something man with shaggy black hair and clothes that seemed to have been pulled randomly from his laundry hamper.
“That’s him. That’s Javier,” Zellerbach said. Randi immediately turned right, leading them on a circuitous route that would allow them to come up behind the Spaniard.
Not surprisingly, there was a Merge hanging on his belt. She deftly flipped the power switch before the three of them dropped into chairs around him.
“Eh!” he said, reaching behind him to turn it back on.
Smith grabbed his wrist. “We’re going to leave that off for a little while, okay?”
De Galdiano used the near-perfect English he’d learned before dropping out of MIT. “Who the hell are you?”
Smith didn’t answer but Zellerbach waved a hand manically to get the Spaniard’s attention. “Javier! It’s me!”
“Marty?” he said, trying to see through the beard and contacts.
“In all my luminous magnificence.”
“Who are these people? Why did you bring them here?”
De Galdiano’s tone had a nervous edge that wasn’t surprising. He had a family, an incredibly high-paying job, and a respectable position in European society. The press and authorities thought he’d left his hacker life behind long ago, and being linked to a group competing to break into the NSA mainframe wouldn’t exactly fit that image.
“They’re my friends. Jon and Randi.”
“Why are they here?”
“Don’t worry. They know about the hack.”
De Galdiano blanched a bit at that, immediately reaching for a bag at his feet and holding it out. “You were supposed to come alone, Marty. If you want people to know about this part of your life, that’s your business. But these are your friends not mine. You had no right.”
“Don’t be mad,” Zellerbach said, pulling out an enormous clown shoe and running a hand along it as though it were a holy relic. He seemed entirely mesmerized for a moment, but then a