Robert Ludlum's The Utopia Experiment - By Kyle Mills Page 0,147
off by a spark when the trigger was pulled.
While entirely invisible to metal detectors, the design had significant drawbacks. The clip held only five rounds and the reload time hovered around fifteen minutes.
Zellerbach slipped past the Spaniard and took a seat in front of the terminal. “Can you get me in?”
De Galdiano entered his password and a graphic of a slowly spinning globe came on screen. Zellerbach pointed to the bright pinpoints of light dotted across it. “Are those the LayerCake server farms?”
“Yes.”
“How many?”
“Hundreds.”
“No problem. No problem. I’m on it.”
De Galdiano walked across the room and sat behind the other terminal in the room. “Are you sending your Internet profile worm, Marty?”
“I’m connecting to the mainframe at my house now…Okay, it’s on its way to you.”
Zellerbach’s profile worm was an incredibly sophisticated web bot that he’d originally designed to constantly search for mentions of him on the ’net and alter the pages to portray him as a particularly attractive combination of Abraham Lincoln, Albert Einstein, and Fabio. Later, he realized that it could also be used to get revenge on the people who had tormented him in high school. In fact, Smith occasionally still searched the names of a few of his football teammates when he needed a laugh. Last time he’d looked up a guy who had once given Zellerbach a very public wedgie, the web was wall-to-wall with reports of his arrest for shoplifting a box of extra-absorbent tampons from a 7-Eleven.
“Got it,” de Galdiano said and then opened the program. A screen came up asking for the full name of the soon-to-be victim. He typed Christian Alphonse Dresner. A list of thirty-nine people by that name came up in the order of Google ranking. Not surprisingly, the man they were looking for was at the top.
“How does it work, Marty?”
Zellerbach was hammering away at his keyboard and it took a moment for him to answer. “There are a lot of different functions, but you just need the simplest. On the first screen, fill in the blank with words you want associated with him and the bot will start inserting them into web pages.”
“Okay. But what are we going to say?”
“Something that will make him unique,” Smith said.
“How about that he has a dachshund fetish?” Randi said, still gazing out the window into the cube farm beyond.
“Yeah, put that in,” Smith said. “But I doubt that’s going to make him completely unique. We need something else.”
“He tried to drown his mother in Vegemite,” Randi said.
This time they all turned to look at her.
“What? I’ve got a million of ’em.”
“Go ahead,” Smith said, feeling a surge of adrenaline twist at his stomach.
The Spaniard typed it in and then let his hand hover over the return key. “What if your suspicions about Dresner are right and this is something he’s watching for? What if this is the trigger?”
It was a risk that they’d discussed at length with Fred Klein before getting the go-ahead to try this particular Hail Mary. It seemed unlikely that Dresner would tie a trigger to what was being said about him on the Internet—thousands of pages were active at any given time, portraying him as everything from the second coming to Satan. But unlikely was admittedly not the same as impossible.
“Randi,” he said, pointing to a laptop sitting on a chair made of Legos. “Get on that and pull up a live video feed.”
“What feed?”
“Anything that’s got people in it.”
She knelt in front of the keyboard and tapped in a few commands. “Okay. I’ve got a webcam in Times Square. What am I looking for?”
“People dropping dead,” Smith said, reaching out and hitting the return button. A counter started scrolling on screen as Zellerbach’s worm went to work modifying web pages with the terms they’d entered. A hundred records. A thousand. Ten thousand.
“Anything?” Smith said.
“Everybody looks okay.”
Despite the powerful air-conditioning, a drop of sweat fell from his nose and splashed on De Galdiano’s keyboard. He’d just pointed a gun at the heads of a million people and clicked on an empty chamber. But he wasn’t done yet.
Unbidden, the Spaniard opened a window to LayerCake and typed “dachshund fetish drown mother vegemite.”
There were too many hits to go through individually, but a quick survey of them suggested that all related to Christian Dresner.
“It worked,” de Galdiano said. “He’s unique in the world. For now.”
“And you can access his personal search parameters?”
“They’re stored in the same place as everyone else’s.”