Duggan’s head ached as he surveyed the familiar flotsam of a one-night stand: half-empty whiskey tumblers, furniture festooned with discarded clothing, a faint whiff of perfume on the pillows. But Duggan knew there was nothing trivial about what had just happened, and not merely because Cara Park was a crucial source and collaborator on the most important case of his career. In the midst of their carnal calisthenics, the tumbling tangle of bodies and limbs, skin to skin, he could feel himself being pulled into her glowing orbit like an asteroid basking in the sun’s invitation to stick around and unfurl its inner comet. The eye-watering catharsis of self-discovery was not an emotion Duggan usually associated with torrid sex, but when he attempted to articulate his feelings, she had placed her finger on his lips as if to seal the words inside him, keeping them safe from unnecessary exposure or scrutiny, available only on a need-to-know basis, along with the rest of their clandestine affair.
After showering and ordering a large pot of black coffee, Duggan’s first instinct was to send a message to Koepp, but he needed Eric’s map before he could call for backup. Instead he called Cara, who was out for the morning with teaching obligations, her administrative assistant informed him, but Eric would be happy to meet with him at the lab at eleven. Duggan confirmed the appointment and turned on the TV while he dressed. The CDC pronouncement had ignited a firestorm of paranoia and public outrage. At least fifteen states were considering laws that would indefinitely outlaw public gatherings of more than a hundred people for any reason, and pressure was mounting on the federal government to take a stand. Drugstores and pharmacies were experiencing a run on Cipro, an antibiotic known to be effective against anthrax, and schools were suspending assemblies and playtimes. Never mind that the CDC had yet to identify a single virus or bacteria responsible for Rave Plague syndrome or confirm that the outbreak was in any way contagious.
Erik was waiting outside the building when Duggan’s car pulled up. “Cara’s sorry she can’t be here—it’s her day to teach—but she told me to tell you to meet her at five forty-five pm in front of the campanile,” he said. “Do you know it?”
“The big clock tower on campus.”
“Yep, that’s the one,” Eric affirmed. “Anyway, Cara told me about your, um, conversation last night. I mean, about how the Rave Plague might be a manifestation of the same serotonin surge as locust swarms. And she told me that you think that what happened in New York was possibly caused by some kind of electromagnetic pulse. Pretty amazing stuff.”
Duggan shook his head. “But it’s not enough,” he said. “Cara said the locust connection was still just a theory, without hard evidence. I don’t even have a solid link between Swarm and the Rave Plague outbreaks.”
Eric raised his finger and smiled. “I think you’re going to like the results of the Rave Plague geo timeline I just finished,” he said. “But first I want to show you something.”
Eric led Duggan down a hallway and ushered him into a storage room stuffed with discarded electronic gear. He pointed to a dishwasher-sized heap of sheet metal, transistors and wires held together with duct tape and bungee cords.
“This,” Eric announced with a sardonic impresario’s flourish, “is PHAROH.”
“Pharoh?”
“It’s an acronym for Poly-Harmonic Audio-Redactive Omnidirectional Hardware,” Eric said. “It’s designed to interrupt the neurons that trigger serotonin production in locust swarms. We field-tested it in East Africa last year on actual locusts. PHAROH’s signal succeeded in canceling out the emergent cohesion of the locust swarm, it even killed a few, but the electromagnetic field was only a few hundred yards wide….”
“So PHAROH was a failure.”
Eric frowned. “That’s what Cara would say. But the test confirmed an emergent link between the locusts that had never been scientifically measured, which was pretty big news at a recent conference, and, most important, it actually did neutralize and disable the locusts that were flying in a proximity bubble around the plane.”
“So what went wrong?”
Eric pointed to another clump of metal next to PHAROH. “See that battery pack? Batteries like that are expensive and really heavy.”
“So if it had more power, you think PHAROH would have worked.”
Eric shrugged. “More power, more money, more time …”
“You’re suggesting PHAROH could be used to disrupt an electromagnetic signal at an EDM rave?”
“I’m not suggesting anything, Agent Duggan,” Eric said, using a conspiratorial tone. “In fact, for the record, I never even showed you this. But I’m sure that if anyone can keep a secret, it’s you.” Eric closed the storage room door and led Duggan back to the lab, where he halted in front a jumbo-sized LCD screen and opened a folder marked “Swarm.”
“This first image is, of course, a map of the USA,” he said. “The orange dots show the location of every outbreak of Raver’s Plague recorded by the CDC, which means that the hospitals had to suspect a cluster or something else out of the ordinary to report it to the feds, which takes us back only about six months. The smallest dots represent outbreaks of five people or fewer; the biggest ones are outbreaks of five hundred or more.”
Eric opened a second US map with a series of green dots on it and superimposed that over the first one. “Now this one shows every stop of the ARK EDM festival, all twenty dates nationwide.”
Eric was waiting for Duggan’s reaction. “You see it, don’t you?”
“The Rave Plague outbreaks don’t match up with the ARK festival.”
“Not until Las Vegas.”
“So we’re back to square one.”
“Not necessarily. It just means that there was some kind of game change in Vegas, no pun intended.”
“You think Las Vegas is the source of the Swarm signal?”
“I was thinking the same thing, but then I remembered that Cara said the New York ARK show—and you can see it’s by far the biggest orange dot—and the Manhattan flash mobs seemed to overlap, both in symptoms and participants. So I called a buddy of mine who is a fanatical flash mobber. He had an IM trail of every Swarm flash mob for the past 18 months. I charted Swarm’s flash mob events with yellow dots, which made it possible for me to do this.”
Eric called up a third map with yellow dots and layered it over the other two patterns. “Beginning in Vegas, Rave Plague outbreaks and flash mobs correspond in every US city, except for one in Texas, where Swarm’s flash mobs preceded the Vegas correlation by almost a year.” The yellow dots were so thick that they almost blotted out the name.
“Damn,” Duggan said. “Swarm started flash mobbing in Austin!”
“Bingo! And it looks like he joined, or started shadowing, the ARK festival in Vegas. So all you have to do is find out which DJ from Austin joined the ARK tour in Vegas …”
“And I’ll find Swarm,” Duggan said.
The Berkeley bio-emergence engineer and the Homeland Security agent high-fived, causing several heads to turn.
“Will you e-mail me a copy of those maps?”
“Sure thing, Agent Duggan. Just give me a few minutes to compress the files …”
But Duggan was already typing into his phone, heading toward the exit.
An hour later, as Duggan was logging in to the NCSD secure conference line with his boss and JT, a file popped up in his secure in-box. It was a government photo of Kenneth Ulrich. He was younger than Duggan expected, with cropped blond hair, steel-rimmed spectacles, chiseled features, and a meticulously trimmed beard. He walked JT and Koepp through Eric’s map and waited for their reaction.
“This is very interesting, Jake,” Koepp said. “But we were hoping you were going to tell us that you’d found Ulrich and had him in custody.”
“Not yet,” Duggan said. “I think I know where he is. I think I know what he’s been doing. If I can find him, then I’ll know what he’s planning to do next.”
Even over the video screen, Koepp was visibly disappointed. “Do you think you could be a little more specific, about Ulrich’s location, I mean?”
Duggan realized it was going to be a harder sell than he expected.
“I get that you suspect Ulrich has been using the stolen DOD software to cause the Raver’s Plague,” JT said, trying to sound supportive. “Meanwhile, the Austin-based DJ who was questioned by the FBI, Xander Smith, has left the country with no forwarding address. But you don’t think he’s Swarm, because you think Swarm is still in Austin. Is that right?”
“It’s mainly circumstantial at this point, but yes,” Duggan admitted. “I think I know a way to smoke Swarm out, but I can’t do it alone.”
“Is the Meta Militia based in Austin too?” Koepp asked.
“Impossible to say since it communicates via slave PCs and encrypted IRC channels on 4chan/b/,” Duggan said. “The militia base, if there is one, could be anywhere. I’ve been working with an evolutionary biologist at UC Berkeley. One of her people made those maps I just showed you. But we need to move on this guy before he changes tactics or disappears again.”
“Ulrich, you mean.”
“No, a flash mob blogger named Swarm, who’s working with Ulrich and who’s probably also connected to the militia and several other cyber-anarchist groups.”
“Let me make sure I’m following you,” Koepp said. “You think an attack is imminent, but you have no material proof except for some threatening blogs by the Meta Militia and someone who calls himself Swarm and who may or may not be Ulrich, or associated with Ulrich, but you have a biology-based theory that he’s hiding out somewhere in Austin, Texas?”
Duggan fought to tamp down his impatience. He knew the case was still half-baked, but his gut told him that every hour of delay increased the chance that Swarm would slip away. He was also annoyed that JT seemed to be playing devil’s advocate by taking Koepp’s side against him. He took a long breath, choosing his next words carefully.
“When I came back from Afghanistan and said the DOD was hiding something about the Westlake shooting, nobody believed it,” Duggan said. “My report was blacked out and put in my boss’s bottom drawer. But my hunch turned out to be right, didn’t it?”
“Sure, Jake,” Koepp allowed, “You were absolutely vindicated. But Kenneth Ulrich is an actual person, and the zeph.r signal really exists. This Swarm character is pretty nebulous. There’s just not enough tangible evidence. You’re asking us to ignore the CDC, sound the alarm to the director, and put all our credibility on the line for a hunch.”
“If you’re wrong, it won’t be just your neck on the chopping block, Jake,” JT added.
There was a lull, and Duggan sensed he was about to get shut down. He knew the prudent course was to submit to reason and err on the side of caution, live to fight another day, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it.
“Let me put it this way,” he said. “As officers of the National Cyber Security Division, I think you would have to agree with me that Stuxnet, Olympic Games, and Conficker are real; the blackouts in New York, India, and Rio were real; tthe cyber-attacks on Google, Sony and Apple were real; and WikiLeaks and Anonymous are real; and the unprovoked massacre of allied Afghan troops by a US drone pilot named Donald Westlake really did happen.”
“Of course,” Koepp said.
“Then you should know that what seems like impossible crackpot science fiction one day can all too suddenly become a hard cold reality the next. In fact, it’s almost guaranteed. You just haven’t accepted it yet because there isn’t enough tangible evidence.”
“Jake, Jake,” JT protested, “nobody is saying—”
“Let me finish,” Duggan growled. “I’m telling you on the record that Swarm and the Meta Militia is real, and if the zeph.r software that Ulrich stole from DOD is deployed, we’ll all be facing something a hundred times worse than any of those other incidents. And all I’m asking of you, as two fellow agency officials entrusted with protecting the nation from precisely this kind of threat, is to help me do everything in my power to stop it from happening before it happens.” Duggan paused. “This conversation is being recorded, right? I just want to be sure.”
Duggan’s colleagues looked at each other. Their flattened faces stared back through the screen and he could almost see the audio tape replaying in their heads.
“All right, Jake,” Koepp said. “Tell us what you need.”
The UC Berkeley campanile was the same building identified on Duggan’s campus map as Sather Tower. He could see why Cara liked it, a gray-stone spire that lorded over a grove of gnarly sycamores with a kind of monolithic grandeur, a good place to take a break from class, read a few pages of poetry, or wait for a surreptitious tryst. He spotted Cara heading toward him on the sloping path. In her skinny jeans and leather jacket, her head bent over a smartphone screen, she could easily be mistaken for a graduate student hurrying to meet her thesis adviser. She was almost on top of him when she looked up.
“Oh, you’re already here.”
“I’m very punctual,” he said.
“That’s good,” Cara said, “because the concert starts in ten minutes and we’ve got some climbing to do.” She took his hand and led him toward the base of the tower, pausing to fish in her purse for a key to the door that opened toward a small interior lobby with an elevator. “C’mon in—don’t be shy,” she said.
“Did you say a concert?”
“Never mind,” Cara faux scolded. The elevator doors shut, and the car began a slow climb to the observation deck. “Now pay attention because there may be a quiz. Please keep your hands to yourself, Mr. Duggan. There’s no groping the teacher during class. After dinner is another story.”
“Yes, professor.”
“Where was I? The campanile you are presently inside of is the third largest bell and clock tower in the world. It’s three hundred and seventeen feet tall and was built in 1914 and designed to resemble the famous clock tower in Venice. Have you ever been to Venice?”
“Not yet.”
“That will cost you half a grade, but you can make it up by taking me there someday.” The elevator doors parted, and Cara pointed the way up a steel-stepped staircase.
“There are sixty-one bells in the tower, the largest of which weighs ten thousand, five hundred pounds. Do you know why there are sixty-one bells, Mr. Duggan?”
“No idea,” he said.
“It’s because the top of this campanile is home to a full-scale carillon.”
They had reached a wooden landing and entered a chamber filled with church bells of every conceivable size. Duggan felt himself transported to a time when bells weren’t just for marking hours and announcing the next class period but also a means to alert populations to impending danger and amplify moments of profound significance. Something moved in the rafters, and he braced himself for a Quasimodo apparition.
“Hi, Agent Duggan. Glad you could make it!” Eric waved to him from the raised platform. “I’m starting in about sixty seconds. I hope you like Philip Glass.”
“You should see your face, Jake,” Cara said, reveling in his astonishment. “A carillon is a concert instrument made of bells that can be played with a keyboard.”
“What’s Eric doing here?
“Eric is a fellow at CNMAT, the Center for New Music and Audio Technologies. CNMAT includes the carillon in its curriculum and allows qualified students to perform concerts in the campanile several times a week. And tonight is Eric’s turn.”
The bells began to peel, a plangent, minimalist chord cycle. Two higher notes mitigated the melancholy and anchored it to a haunting, repeating progression. Duggan felt the mammoth chimes reverberating through his body, saturating his senses. During the stirring recital, he noticed some words engraved onto the biggest bell, a tone poem in every possible way.
The music stopped, and Eric emerged from the belfry to greet them. “What did you think?”
Cara and Duggan broke into heartfelt applause. “It was one of the most incredible things I’ve ever experienced,” Duggan said. “I didn’t know much about Philip Glass, but I just became a fan.” “Well done, maestro. Bravo!”
Eric took a bashful bow. “So glad you liked it. The piece is adapted for carillon from his solo piano works—‘Metamorphosis One.’ It’s a reference to the novel by Franz Kafka.”
“Which is about a man who turns into a cockroach,” Duggan pointed out.
“Indeed it is,” Eric said.
“Eric has a fine ear for music and bio-irony,” Cara observed proudly.
“Now, I understand why bells are put in churches to summon the faithful,” Duggan said. “And the music they make is fantastic, but what’s their connection to advanced technology?”
“A number of things, actually,” Eric said. “We’re working with the Music Genome Project. It’s what powers that app on your phone that finds the name of a song you like that’s playing in a bar or a restaurant. Anyway, we’re working with them to identify the numinous elements of music, the common denominator in religious hymns, African slave spirituals, Handel’s Messiah. You know, the sound of inspiration and rapture.”
“The voice of God,” Duggan intoned.
“Yes, exactly!”
“Kind of like the poem inscribed on that bell over there.” Duggan pointed and enunciated the words:
We ring, we chime, we toll.
Lend ye the silent part.
Some answer in the heart;
Some echo in the soul.
Eric clasped his hands over his head. “Whoa, that’s freaking awesome. I can’t believe I never noticed it!” He retrieved his phone and took a photo of the inscription. “Anyway, the other project with CNMAT is about hooking up the bells to the Internet. See those magnets up there?” He pointed to several oblong contraptions mounted next to the bell clappers with motorized hammers and dangling wires. “Eventually they’ll be connected to a wireless remote control digital player. A church in Siberia already uses the same software to perform for masses and holidays. The priest loves it.”
“And the congregation too, I’m sure,” Duggan said. “So once it’s wired up and operational, a pianist in Russia could do a guest gig on this carillon without ever having to get on a plane and actually be here. You could hook these bells up to another keyboard, a laptop, anything.”
“Yeah, pretty much,” Eric agreed.
“How about a DJ deck?”
“Ha!” Eric crumpled over, pointing to Duggan. “Dr. Park, this guy! This guy is too much!” Eric righted himself and took a breath. “Sorry, it’s been a long day,” he said, composing himself. He gathered his things and bounded for the stairs. “I gotta run. Thanks for coming, and enjoy your dinner. I hear the place is dope!”
Duggan turned to Cara. “That was an amazing surprise. Thank you.”
“You’re very welcome.”
He leaned in to kiss her, then caught himself.
Eric’s voice echoed up from the stairwell. “No worries. I already know, and I definitely approve. My lips are sealed—unlike yours.”
Duggan took her to dinner at one of the Bay Area’s new gastronomic hot spots. Bearded waiters in crisp striped shirts and wool waistcoats hovered vigilantly. Duggan and Cara sat at a dimly lit table for two and ordered a Santa Barbara Zinfandel and postmodern tapas made from organic ingredients grown at local farms. Duggan’s rising euphoria was tempered by his corresponding vulnerability. He felt like an emotional hemophiliac. One little scratch and he might bleed to death.
“Gee, a smart, beautiful woman, good food, and church bells—I must be in heaven,” he said.
“Or at a wedding,” Cara quipped. “You haven’t even tasted the duck yet.”
“Listen to me.” Duggan reached across the table and intertwined his fingers with hers. “You are an incredible woman. I’m ecstatic about this, about us. But I must confess that I have a terrible track record with relationships. The last thing in the world I …”
Cara held up her hand. “Wait. Before you go any further, I have my own confession to make. I am a total relationship-phobe. I mean, not partially but totally. Especially when I feel like this, the knowledge that there could be real emotion and connection, it’s like a self-destruct button. I start analyzing and second-guessing every move, yours and mine. I start thinking it’s all just chemicals and synapses firing, biology taking its course. Hormones, the genetic imperative, commanding us to have sex, to think we care.”
“Wow.” Duggan retracted his hand and leaned back in his chair. “I’m just wondering who’s going to fight for this relationship, because it’s certainly not one of us.”
Cara shrugged. “Beats me. And I’m not into threesomes.”
“Me neither,” Duggan said, “for the most part.”
“Then I guess we’re screwed,” Cara said.
“Yep,” Duggan agreed. “So can I sleep at your place tonight?”
“Absolutely.”
They stared into each other’s eyes, and he refilled their glasses. Somehow they’d managed to sidestep the usual booby traps. Despite their personal baggage, so far it was a clean slate, a good start. The food, the wine, and the vibe all conspired to convince Duggan that this was the real deal. He put down his glass and waited for her attention. “There’s something else we need to discuss,” he said.
“Shoot.”
“I saw Eric’s maps, and I showed them to my bosses at the agency.”
“How did that go?”
“They’re giving me the federal and local authority to make an arrest. Now all I have to do is produce a suspect.”
“Jake, I get it. You need to find Swarm. And you will.”
Duggan took a long sip, steeling himself. “Cara, I have no right to ask you this, but I’m getting desperate.”
“I already said I’d sleep with you.”
Duggan smiled wanly. “I want you to go on TV and talk about your theory, just the way you explained it to me at the bar the other night. I’m asking you to make a public appeal to Swarm as a scientist, to tell him that what he’s doing has potentially disastrous effects that he doesn’t understand, that he can’t control.”
“That’s all true,” Cara said as she ate.
“And I want you to say that you’re willing to meet with him. I want you to pique his interest, make him come to you.”
Cara stopped chewing and slowly wiped her mouth. “You want me to go on TV and ask for a date with a cyber-terrorist?”
Duggan nodded. “That’s exactly what I want.”
“And you’re not even a little worried about my safety?”
“Of course, I am. That’s why when he contacts you, you’re going to insist that the meeting happens in a public place. You can let him choose the venue, but it has to be out in the open. That way I can protect you.”
“And you can catch your mystery man, your elusive Swarm.”
“That’s the idea.”
She seemed stunned, appalled. He reached for her hand, but she pulled it away.
“What makes you think this sociopath you’re after will even talk to me?”
“Cara, he’s a techno-anarchist, not a serial killer. This person is extremely intelligent, a former Defense Department scientist who defected for personal reasons. Trust me—he’ll want to hear your theory. There’ll be a small army of agents and police on the scene. You know I’d never do anything to put you in danger.”
“The Rave Plague signal is military software?” Cara shook her head. “Jesus Christ, Duggan. And you guys wonder why the government gets a bad rap.”
“Cara, this guy is a public menace. Innocent people have already died, and if I can’t stop him, this is only the beginning. Because of you and Eric, we’re on the right track to get him. Nobody has your skills, and you’ve helped me get this far. Do this and you’ll have done your country a great service and saved many lives, including mine.”
“Okay, hold it right there,” Cara said. She picked up her glass and drained it. “I liked it better when you were asking me for a sleepover.”
“I still am,” he said.
Tom was blasting Joy Division’s “Love Will Tear Us Apart” as he hurriedly packed and reviewed his mental checklist. The song always cheered him up, which was arguably counterintuitive for an English band that had taken its name from the prostitution wing of a Nazi concentration camp. In a couple of days, he would be joining Xander in Berlin, but first he had some loose ends to wrap up, one of which was attending a meeting with an evolutionary biologist named Cara Park, who had appeared on local TV to appeal for an audience with Swarm.
“You don’t know me,” she said to the camera in a video clip that had gone viral on YouTube, “but if you really care about your followers, then you have to hear me out. There are dangers in what you’re doing, consequences and repercussions you can’t possibly anticipate. Please contact me before it’s too late, for your own sake as well as the millions who have heard and heeded your message.” The talk show host tried to get her to say more, but she insisted that only she could deliver the details of her warning to Swarm—in person.
Park’s message had both intrigued and disturbed Tom. He obviously had a weakness for beautiful women who spoke directly to him through a camera lens. But what, if anything, did she actually know about zeph.r? Was it a fishing expedition or a trap? He was going to find out, but he would take proper precautions. It didn’t ultimately make any difference, because the Tom Ayana who lived in Austin was part of a life that he was leaving behind, like a snake sloughing off its old skin in order to keep growing. He would miss his mother, but in most ways that mattered, he’d checked out a long time ago.
Tom took it as a positive sign that Austin’s annual South by Southwest Interactive conference happened to be in full swing. The city was packed with techies and social media mavens who had come to mingle and swap business cards during the nonstop barrage of meetings, product demos, and sponsored parties overflowing with free food, drink, and branded industry swag. The hordes of hackers, software engineers, and mid-level media managers were his kind of people, the kind that checked their mobile devices every ten seconds to get details about the next presentation or event they absolutely couldn’t miss, the kind who knew that the only thing cooler than being in the know about a paradigm-shifting innovation was having co-written the business plan.
It wasn’t hard to find Cara Park’s e-mail and send her an encrypted message to meet him at a place where he controlled the environment and everything that happened in it. The zeph.r code was safe in the cloud, but now that Park knew Swarm was in Austin, the feds wouldn’t be far behind. Tom decided that Xander had picked an opportune moment to take a vacation and that Berlin was a perfect place to get high and lie low, moving by night through the underground club circuit, an internationalist hyper-creative community that would embrace them, absorb them, and conceal them for as long as they needed or wanted. He didn’t even have to learn German.
Cara called Duggan the minute she received Swarm’s text.
“Read it to me exactly as he wrote it,” he told her.
“All it says is this: ‘Dear Professor Park, I saw you on television talking about Swarm. You seem unusually informed and intelligent for an academic. I’d be happy to hear your theories about human evolution. Meet me Thursday for the SXSW Gaming Expo at the Palmer Center. Find the Luminescence multi-player contest and log in under your own name. Wait for me in the grove of aspens behind the castle at exactly three in the afternoon. I’ll join you there as Mr. Aws.’”
“That’s all?”
“Yes,” Cara confirmed. “What’s Luminescence?”
“It’s a virtual reality game.”
“He wants me to meet him in a game?”
“It’s a fantasy world where people appear as avatars who can communicate with each other by typing or talking into voice-recognition software.”
“Like a chat room.”
“Yeah, but more visually elaborate,” Duggan explained. “You know, as in speech bubbles. You need to answer him.”
“What should I say?”
“Just say you’ll be there.”
“Anything else?”
“After you answer, don’t touch your computer,” he instructed. “I’m sending some men over now to do a trace on the text. I’m sure he’s covered his tracks, but just in case he made a mistake. My associates are heading to you now with a copy of the game and headgear. They give you a crash course on Luminescence today so you can navigate the game and find the virtual meeting place tomorrow. They’ll bring your credentials for the conference too.”
“You’re not coming?”
“I’ve got to make sure we’ve got a proper reception waiting for Mr. Aws. I’ll be there to meet you at the Austin airport at noon.”
“Jake, how can you be sure that Mr. Aws is Swarm?”
“Typical hacker humor,” Duggan noted.
“What do you mean?”
“Mr. Aws is Swarm spelled backward.”