I make my entrance into OmniVore headquarters the next evening at 11:00 P.M. I walk in through the front door.
Just for tonight, I’m part of the cleaning crew, which is mostly staffed by illegal immigrants. Their bosses squeeze the maximum square footage of clean office space out of each worker, so they usually end up alone and unsupervised, trying desperately to clean a whole floor before moving on to the next building on the night’s schedule.
And each one of them has an all-access pass to every office in the building.
Most corporations already know about this glaringly obvious hole in their security. The guys who spend millions to protect their corporate secrets still can’t resist cheaping out on their cleaning contracts, however. The worst they can imagine is one of the janitors going through a desk for valuables. Other than that, they don’t think about it. The people in coveralls and uniforms barely register to the men who hire them; they hardly even exist.
I found my janitor the same way I found Max: hanging around outside the building and watching the crews as they emerged after work. I got a good look into their minds as they headed back to their van. Even at 1:00 A.M., most of them were on their way to a second job, which meant they’d work more hours in a day than any programmer, and not while sitting down either. Most of them had families. That’s why they were sweating all night: to put some cash away to give their sons and daughters a better life than they’d ever see. I could feel the hope and the exhaustion coming off them like steam.
They were useless. They had too much to lose.
Fortunately, there’s always at least one guy who’s looking for an excuse to get fired. That was Anthony.
Anthony left work every night in time to catch the last shift at the strip club. He was already planning ahead for the weekend, when he’d drive his rebuilt Camaro across the state line into Nevada and blow whatever was left of his paycheck at the craps tables.
I approached him with cash in hand, and rented his uniform and his place on the night shift for five hundred bucks.
The supervisor and all of Anthony’s coworkers look right at me, but they don’t see me. They see the picture I’m putting in their heads: Anthony, slouched behind his cleaning cart, filling out his uniform as usual.
This is my version of an invisibility cloak. The technical term is “inattentional blindness,” a kind of cognitive dead zone in your visual field. Your brain is constantly bombarded with more stimuli than it can possibly handle: about fourteen million bits of information a second, according to the guys who keep count of that sort of thing. It has to narrow all those millions of bits down to a manageable amount just so you aren’t paralyzed by all the incoming data. So it takes shortcuts. It cheats.
Your vision, for instance. Over a third of your brain is dedicated to processing the details streaming in from your eyes, and it’s still not enough. So your brain ignores most of what you see. The couch in the living room, the tree outside your office window, the people standing with you in line for the ATM—your brain skims right over them to save time and energy. It fills in the gaps with the same images over and over, like the scenery behind the characters in one of those old Hanna-Barbera cartoons. That’s the reason that you don’t see your missing car keys on the front table, even when you’ve looked there a dozen times. They faded into the background.
In other words, you really only see what you expect to see. And I can manage those expectations. Everyone here expects to see Anthony, and their minds supply all the details I need to hide in plain sight. To them, I’m as invisible as chewing gum on the sidewalk.
Unless they step in it, of course.
We push the carts into the elevators, past the security guards at the front desk. I’m subtly reinforcing their apathy by broadcasting <nothing to see here> in every direction. Sure enough, they don’t give me a second look.
I can’t fool the cameras, though. They’re everywhere now. I’m pretty sure my ball cap and three-day stubble are enough to beat any facial-recognition software that OmniVore might have, but it won’t stand up when a real person checks the video tomorrow.
It won’t matter. Tomorrow will be way too late.
I BREAK AWAY from the rest of the cleaning crew, taking my little cart up twenty-six stories to OmniVore’s offices.
Anthony’s key card opens the doors, and I walk inside. I remove a steering-wheel lock hidden in the cart and stick it through the door handles. The doors themselves are wood paneling over a fireproof steel core; the building code requires it. It would take a forklift to break them down, so I should have time to work.
OmniVore’s space is set up along an open floor plan. It doesn’t have cubicles, let alone offices. The desks are arranged in some kind of fractal pattern, probably designed by an industrial consultant at $350 an hour to maximize efficiency and proper communication. The whole place hums with raw computing power: there’s a rack of machines in one corner, hooked to the workstations, quietly processing terabytes of raw data. There’s a kitchen area devoted to snacks, with espresso machines, Sub-Zero refrigerators, and smoothie makers. There’s a gym area, including a climbing wall built into the concrete that goes all the way up to the ceiling. There are sofas with pillows for power naps. In another corner, there are foosball tables and classic arcade games—which should be a little too dot-com for a company like OmniVore, actually. The whole place is an adult version of a preschool, filled with soft corners and fun toys.
There’s only one office with actual doors and walls: it’s a huge, two-story atrium, like a glass rocket aimed at the ceiling. It surrounds a couch, table and chairs, and a desk cut from a massive slab of redwood. There’s only one screen in the room, a giant HD display on the desk, with a tasteful little brushed-aluminum keyboard in front of it.
Preston’s inner sanctum. Big glass windows so he can see out, but I have no doubt that the glass goes opaque at the push of a button whenever he decides he wants privacy.
There’s a clear line from Preston’s office to the fire exit. That’s good. I use a metal wedge to jam that door shut so no one can sneak in behind me. Then I make a quick circuit of the rest of the area.
There’s food on the floor, trash everywhere, and gum stuck to the desks. These guys are slobs. If I was actually here to do Anthony’s job, I’d be in trouble.
Instead, I remove my packages from the cleaner’s cart and place them close to any computer I find. The open floor plan helps. Walls might have seriously screwed up the range and impact.
I head back to Preston’s office.
Unsurprisingly, Anthony’s key card does not work on the reader on Preston’s door. It blares loudly at me, a warning not to try it again. I’m sure the unauthorized entry was logged somewhere, but nobody’s going to come running for an honest mistake by the janitor.
There’s a keypad. Just for fun, I try the passcode I fished out of Max’s head.
The door alarm blares again, louder this time. Two strikes. Now I’m sure that another attempt will bring security.
I didn’t really expect the passcodes and key card to work. Just like he’s the only one in the office with a door that locks, Preston’s the sort of guy who has to have control of his own secrets.
I wasn’t able to snag any of his passwords or security codes when I went on my raid inside his head. Even if I had, it would be stupid to expect that they remain the same from day to day. A guy like Preston understands security. He knows you need a constantly shifting passcode, keyed to an authentication token, like a chip on a smartcard. Or, even better, something like retinal scanning.
I don’t have that. I have a short-handled sledgehammer. It breaks the lock on the door with one swing.
Alarms immediately begin shrieking. It’s annoying, but I’ve worked with gunfire going past my head, so it’s not enough to distract me. I drop the sledge and wheel the cart through the door, then get behind Preston’s desk.
I pick up the desk phone and dial a number I’ve been saving in the back of my memory.
A voice on the other end. “Hello?”
He sounds groggy. Well, even boy billionaires need their sleep.
“Hello, Preston,” I say.
I didn’t get passwords, but I did manage to retain Preston’s personal cell number. I know he keeps it with him constantly—he’s got the same complicated, needy relationship with his toys as any other geek—and he’ll always pick up for a call coming from work, even at three in the morning.
“I thought you’d want to know that in less than five minutes, you’re going to get a call from security, letting you know that someone has broken into your office,” I tell him.
Preston knows this isn’t the protocol. This isn’t how he should be alerted to a security breach. And that wakes him up fast.
“What? Who is this?” he demands. His voice is instantly alert.
“I’m the guy who broke into your office, genius,” I say. “It’s John Smith. It’s time we had another talk.”
“YOU’RE A FUCKING dead man,” Preston says.
I’ll be honest. I didn’t have to make this call. But it’s worth it just to hear the rage.
“Yeah, I’ve heard that before,” I say. I follow the cords from the monitor into a hole in the big slab of the desk.
“I mean it,” he snarls. “You’re so fucking dead. I didn’t think you were smart, but this is just stupid. What are you going to do? You’re stuck in my office.”
“I might surprise you,” I say.
“You can’t surprise me,” he snaps. “I know all about you now.”
“Really? What’s my favorite ice cream flavor?”
“Fuck you.”
“So close. It’s strawberry.”
There it is. The computer’s hard drive is located underneath the big slab of wood behind a hidden door. It’s big—industrial-server size—and custom built.
“I know about you,” he repeats. “You’re supposed to be some kind of psychic.”
That is interesting. His CIA contacts have decided to bring him into the loop about my talents. Which tells me that they’ve decided he’s more valuable than whatever secrets I used to hold.
“I don’t like that term,” I say as I drag the hard drive out from under the desk. “See, what we call the mind is actually a metaphor for all the different processes—memories, physical sensations, emotions, thoughts, and reflexes—running inside your head, and what I do is—”
“Spare me,” he says. “I’ve read your file. Whatever it is you do, I know you’re not bulletproof. That’s all that matters.”
“Come on, Preston,” I say. “Do you really think I’d call you up without a good reason?”
He takes a deep breath. I can almost hear him trying to regain control.
“All right,” he says. “Tell me. What do you want?”
“I’m giving you one last chance to end this peacefully,” I tell him. “You give me what I want, and I go away.”
“I assume you’ve got a list of demands.”
Now he’s stalling. He wants to give his security team plenty of time to reach me. If I had to guess, I’d say he was talking to me on his personal phone, and frantically texting on another device, telling his goons to get here as fast as possible.
Doesn’t matter. They’ll be too late.
“Nothing too difficult for a guy like you,” I say. “Call off the hit on me and Kelsey. Restore my house and my bank accounts. And then add one million dollars for the inconvenience.”
“And if I don’t?”
I use my Batman voice. “Then I’ll destroy everything you’ve built. Starting right here, right now.”
He laughs at me. Remember what I said about the essence of a good threat? The target has to believe you can carry it out. And Preston clearly does not believe me. “Well, that sounds reasonable. Thing is, I don’t have that kind of cash on me. Will you take a check?”
“You know, Eli, you are not coming across as completely sincere.”
“And they said you couldn’t do your little mind-reading act over the phone.”
Fine. I didn’t really expect him to fold. We’ll do it the hard way.
While pulling the hard drive out from the desk, I accidentally bump the keyboard, and the giant HD screen flares to life. There’s a simple password prompt over the OmniVore logo.
That’s not what I need. I already know it’s a waste of time to try Max’s passwords and logins. Like the door, there’s only one wizard with the magic words to open this gate.
And he’s not sounding very cooperative.
Fortunately, I have another, more reliable method to get what I want out of the computer.
I take my last tool from the cart: a high-speed, handheld rotary zip saw. Slices through sheet metal quicker than a knife through a beer can in those infomercials.
I put the phone on speaker and turn on the saw. “Just remember,” I say, “I tried to negotiate.”
I fire up the saw and cut into the computer’s casing. Then I carve the hard drive out of the machine.
I can hear Preston yelling, even over the sirens and the metal-on-metal shriek of the saw.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” he yells over the speaker as I turn off the saw.
“I’m sure you’ve got a link to the cameras in your office. You should be able to see.”
The drive is huge, at least compared to the off-the-shelf units you can buy at Staples. It still fits easily into a small messenger bag, however.
I look up and find the camera. I smile, and hold up the bag.
“I know what you keep in here,” I tell him.
The source code for Cutter. The core of his business. The engine to his Ferrari.
Maybe it’s just a huge coincidence that both Sloan and Preston came up with software that can sift so brilliantly through trillions of bytes of raw data. I’ve got a theory about that. Maybe I’ll get to test it someday. Maybe I’ll never know.
Either way, I’ve got years of Preston’s work—his entire life—in this little box. Without what’s on this hard drive, he’s got to start all over. Without this, he loses the bleeding edge.
“I’ve got the heart of Cutter,” I tell him. “I’ve got the key to your whole world, right here.”
There’s a long pause. Then Preston erupts into howls of vicious laughter.
“You can’t really be that dumb,” he says. “Are you a fucking moron? Do you really think I’d be so stupid as to keep something like that on one computer? With no backups? Oh my God, you idiot. I can’t believe you had me worried for a second. I’ve got multiple copies of my software throughout the office, on every machine. How else do you think we operate? We back up every day to a central storage facility. That hard drive is just one place I keep the data. Honestly, have you never used a computer?”
He goes on like that. I’m distracted by other things.
The alarms stop blaring. Almost at the same time, the pounding on the outer doors stops. Then I hear muffled orders, followed by the sound of heavy equipment moving.
That’s a bad sign. The real professionals have arrived.
I hear a loud, high-pitched whine. I stand up and look toward the doors. There’s a bright flare of light. Sparks flying from the doors. Someone thought to bring an angle grinder. They must have been Boy Scouts in an earlier life.
I’ve got maybe five minutes before they breach the doors.
I check my watch. It’s going to be close.
“You’re going to want to order your men to back off now,” I tell Preston.
“Are you listening to me? You have no leverage, dipshit. All you’ve got is the sharp end of the stick, and I am personally going to jam it so far up your—”
“Preston,” I snap, cutting him off. “I’m sure a computer genius like you knows how to do a remote-access login on a server.”
That stops him short. “What? Yeah. Of course.”
“You say you have everything backed up? You might want to take a quick look at that. Just to check.”
There’s a pause. Then I hear the quiet clacking of a keyboard.
“No,” Preston says quietly. “No, no, no, no, no, no, no . . .”
“Lose something?” I ask.
“Son of a bitch,” he shouts. “Where is it? How did you do that? You son of a bitch, where the hell is all my data?”
I NEVER MEANT to use Max’s knowledge to get inside OmniVore’s offices.
It never would have worked. He was too low on the totem pole. Only Preston would have access to the source code and the algorithm.
But Max’s passwords and logins were more than enough to get me access to the remote server farm where OmniVore keeps all its backups.
Of course I knew Preston would have a remote storage facility. Everyone in the industry does, because it’s cheap and efficient. Instead of the expense and hassle of maintaining their own huge banks of computers, they rent out space on a rack of servers kept in a warehouse. Then they upload their data to the servers on a daily basis, usually on an automated schedule. That way, if there’s a power failure or a virus or a fire, the company’s data is safe and sound, miles away.
It’s common practice, even for a guy who’s using classified, black-ops-level software. Almost everybody knows about remote storage facilities.
What most people don’t know is that their security is god-awful.
As soon as I had the information I needed from Max’s brain, I dropped Kelsey at a hotel and drove straight to OmniVore’s server farm.
There was one security guard working the desk that late at night. The facilities have to be open 24-7 so their clients can get access at any time.
The guard was playing Angry Birds and reliving a little family drama when I showed up.
<why do I always have to be the bad guy?> <she gets to say yes to everything, I always have to say no> <crying over a damn cookie> <I don’t like it either> <dammit, kills me every time> <just a damn cookie> <maybe I could be the one who says yes be the good guy for a change> <bring some cookies-and-cream ice cream home, maybe> <no, kid’s going to weigh two hundred pounds if we don’t draw the line somewhere> <dammit>
I had a clipboard and a suit jacket. That and a confident wave took me right past him. He barely looked up from his iPad.
There was a glass door leading back to the racks of computer servers, separated by mesh metal cages. Each company has its own sector of the farm; the more data the company stored, the more floor space. OmniVore’s servers took about half the warehouse. Its cage was helpfully labeled with its name above the door.
I put my clipboard into my bag, took out a pick gun, snapped it twice in the lock, and the cage popped open.
A moment later, I used a USB cord to hook my laptop to the nearest server. That’s when I tapped Max’s knowledge. My fingers flew over the keys, just like his would. For a few seconds, it was like having his talent. I flew past the login prompts, entered the right passwords, and got access to the server’s main memory.
Then I uploaded a file from the laptop into the server and inserted the virus. Nothing too fancy, really. You can get the program from the Internet yourself, and customize it with a few keystrokes. It instructed the servers to wipe their own hard drives, and then overwrite them with random gibberish. Once it was done, all of OmniVore’s backup data would be irretrievably lost.
The whole errand took less than ten minutes.
On the way out, I waved at the security guard again.
“Have a good night,” he said.
“Next time, just give your kid the cookie,” I told him. “Life’s too short.”
He gave me a strange look as I went out the door.
“YOU SON OF a bitch,” Preston says again. “I am going to make sure they keep you alive until I can get there. Then I am going to put a fucking ice pick right into your fucking eyeball—”
“Focus, Eli. We’re on a bit of a clock. Order your guys to get back from the doors.”
He laughs, but he sounds a lot less amused now. “Why the hell should I?”
I check my watch again. Getting down to the wire.
“Because I’ve got the only copy of your life’s work here in my hands.”
“I told you: every computer in there has the algorithm in one form or another. The building is surrounded by my people. You are trapped inside. As soon as my guys get in there, I get everything back. How do you not get this already? You’ve got no hand.”
“Preston, I’m not screwing around. Get them back right now.”
He starts screaming again. “Are you retarded? They’re going to be through the door in two minutes, and then—”
“And the bombs go off in one,” I shout back. I’m yelling at the phone, because I’m running for the fire exit.
I yank the wedge from the doorframe and pull the door open in one move. Whatever Preston says next is lost in the scream of the fire alarm. The door slams shut behind me.
I take the stairs four at a time, but even so, I’m barely down two floors when the explosion hits.
A REGULAR BOMB isn’t enough to destroy all the data in a computer. There are tools that can scrape lost bits of information from hard drives that have been smashed with a hammer.
What you need is an EMP bomb: a weapon that releases an electromagnetic pulse as it detonates, frying the circuits of anything electronic inside its blast radius.
This sounds like it should be science fiction. It’s actually disturbingly easy to find the plans for one on the Internet. Sure, you’ll probably end up on a terrorist watch list, but by the time the FBI gets around to visiting you, you could build a couple hundred of the things.
It took me only about half a day to make six. I had help from Tidhar, who kept a whole box of construction-grade Semtex, the civilian version of C-4 plastic explosive, inside his storage unit.
Basically, an EMP bomb is an electromagnetic coil wrapped around a simple pipe device. The detonation of the explosion releases electromagnetic waves in a single strong burst. The pulse fries anything with a computer chip that’s inside the blast radius—and the shrapnel destroys anything else that’s left.
The effect is a lot like putting your laptop in a microwave. And then dropping the microwave off a cliff.
The inside of my messenger bag is lined in metallic foil. Zipped closed, it will keep the hard drive safe from the EMP.
But everything else inside OmniVore’s headquarters has just been reduced to smoking, high-tech scrap.
I REACH THE first floor running, out of breath. The sprinkler system is going full tilt and the air is full of smoke. Fire engines and police cruisers are already outside the building.
I’m not the only guy in a janitor’s outfit to emerge from the fire stairs. A couple of OmniVore’s security goons try to keep us penned in the lobby, but the cops and the firefighters won’t have it. We’re all released into the courtyard in front of the building and quickly hustled to a safe distance.
I spare a quick glance upward. The windows on the top floors are all gone, and smoke pours from the building’s empty sockets. OmniVore’s headquarters looks like a cheap cigar set on its end.
Maybe I used too much Semtex. It’s been a while since Bomb Building 101.
I walk away from the crowd while everyone’s attention is fixed on the fire.
Kelsey waits in a car at the corner. Her eyes are wide, her pulse is hammering. <holy crap> <so that’s what a bomb looks like in real life> But once again, she holds it together.
“You okay?” she asks.
I nod, and she pulls out into traffic. Smoothly, not too fast, not drawing any attention to us. The CIA really screwed up when they passed her over. She would have been great.
We drive away, the building still smoldering in the rearview.