“You have to understand that I’ve signed legally binding confidentiality agreements with these clients, any violation of which would mean the end of my career for sure, and more than likely a Guantánamo Bay kind of prosecution, with an anonymous deep-sea burial.” Gunnar looked at each of them in turn. “You get what I’m saying, right? These people don’t screw around. Serve them and you’re family; cross them and you’re dead. And, believe me, there are many, many people just waiting for me to cross the wrong person.”
“Even our government?” Mason said.
“Especially our government. You’re familiar with DARPA, right?”
“It’s a division of the DoD. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. What’s the connection?”
“In 1969, it commissioned the development of ARPANET, which was a wide-area computer network that connected several dozen organizations. The first of it kind. As technology advanced, so did ARPANET. The U.S. government recognized the massive potential for this level of interconnectivity and designed an application that utilized synchronously orbiting satellites, called SATNET, which was then integrated into ARPANET. But in order to accommodate this expansion, they needed something like a phone number for each, so that one user could call another directly and not the group as a whole. And they needed some sort of gateway between these different networks to compensate for differences in data size and interface specifications. These gateways also needed to check the destination ‘phone numbers’ and forward the communications to the right recipients. The solution was a kind of software developed by Cerf called TCP, which produced a steady flow of data from source to end user.
“The TCP protocol created a kind of architecture that bridged the connectivity between ARPANET and SATNET. It utilized a system of addressing individual users by employing a standardized numbering system called an IP protocol and routers that served as gateways, and essentially mapped out all of the different users like one big city on a worldwide web to form a single unified network. ARPANET adopted this new TCP/IP protocol and further broke its networks down into local area networks, or LANs.”
“You’re talking about the Internet, Gunnar. I’m familiar with the concept.”
“It’s important that you understand its origins in order to follow me through this. Just pay attention. So about the same time DARPA’s ramping up its own network, the National Science Foundation looks at what the DoD is doing and decides to explore the impact of this new computer world on science and engineering by creating the Computer Science Network, or CSNET. Now everybody starts getting in on the act. You get BITNET on campuses and mail capabilities on ARPANET. From there, the NSF contracted IBM and MCI to construct a new network to expand the capabilities of CSNET, which it renamed NSFNET, which augmented ARPANET until it was decommissioned in the early nineties. And then, finally, the government figured out a way to profit from it and opened it to commercial usage.”
“And porn,” Ramses said. “Don’t forget the porn.”
“So the NSF pulled out in response, and voilà … you have the Internet: a computer network with the ability to connect billions of people all around the world. Suddenly, the federal government of the United States of America found itself almost accidentally sitting on unlimited access to every communication, every transaction, made by everyone from private individuals to large corporations, all on a network of its own design and implementation.”
“Where are you going with this?” Mason asked.
“What you need to understand is that the Internet is one elaborate platform on an existing network that functions by utilizing a specific software protocol. Think of the network itself as a system of gravel roads that connects an unlimited number of houses. The Internet is the result of turning those gravel roads into highways by using the TCP/IP protocol like asphalt and tar. The cars and trucks and motorcycles that travel on it are packets of data being sent back and forth in continuous streams.
“Now that you have this network in place and the government checking every vehicle that passes through—opening the trunk, searching behind the seats—there’s really no way to get anything from point A to point B without someone knowing exactly what you’re doing. But you could always fly from one point to the other, right? You could cruise over the road at any altitude you wanted and still follow its course. You could build a subway underneath it. You could construct another highway on pylons directly above the original highway. What I’m saying is that the existing architecture is already there; all you would need is a different operating protocol, a different type of interface, and a discrete addressing system and you could send information across the same existing network someone already went to all the trouble of building for you. Unless whoever was serving as watchdog had access to your protocol and software, he’d never be able to view the information. All anyone would ever detect was a subtle initial increase in bandwidth usage when this new network launched, and after that it would just blend into the background cyber noise.”
“Like the dark web.”
“Exactly, but designed exclusively for a select group of users.”
“And I assume you have access to this alternate Internet?”
“Two of them, actually.”
“How did you get them?”
“Directly from my contacts in the government.”
“But you just said that the government couldn’t—”
“I didn’t say ‘couldn’t’ oversee; I said ‘didn’t.’ One of the networks I can access belongs exclusively to the federal government itself. What do you think, the president just calls up the secretary of defense in the middle of the night on an open airwave? Anyone could pluck their conversation right out of the ether.”
“You said two. What about the other one?”
“That’s where things get interesting.” Gunnar smiled and closed all of the windows he had opened. There were probably a hundred different icons on his desktop, most of which Mason had never seen before. Gunnar selected one that looked like a broadsword from which a triangular flag and a rounded flag flew to the right of the blade, near the hilt. When he touched the icon, the screen immediately turned black. “Watch this.”
Gunnar used his index finger to draw a vertical line from the top of the screen to the bottom, right down the center. Nothing appeared on the screen, which remained black the entire time. He drew a shorter horizontal line across the first, as though making a lowercase t, then used the right end to draw a diagonal line back to the vertical line and a bulge beneath the resultant triangle in the shape of a half circle. It was a simplified version of the icon on his desktop.
“What does the symbol mean?” Mason asked.
“I don’t know,” Gunnar said, “but this is the cool part.”
“What am I supposed to be seeing?”
“Wait for it. Another thirty seconds.”
They all stared at the blank screen until a red rectangular frame appeared in the center. Gunnar placed the tip of the middle finger on his left hand in the center of the rectangle and held it there for several seconds. When he withdrew it, the ghostly image of his fingerprint slowly faded away. The red rectangle disappeared and another one with a mint green frame appeared.
Gunnar pressed his index finger to his lips. Mason glanced over at Ramses in time to see him roll his eyes.
“Password,” Gunnar said. The digital representation of his voice streaked across the rectangle from left to right. A yellow version appeared behind it and authenticated the green word he had just spoken. The box cleared itself. “The password changes every time someone accesses the system. It’s never the exact same thing twice. There are ten different variables, each with fifty-two possible choices, all of which are coded in one of ten different colors to specify the language in which to speak that particular section of the password. That’s nearly an infinite number of possible combinations, all verified by voice. And you only have thirty seconds to answer. I guess you could say that no one gets in without an invitation.”
A series of ten numbers appeared above the box: green 8, red 43, yellow 51, blue 19, orange 23, purple 32, white 16, pink 27, brown 4, and gray 29.
Gunnar spoke the combination out loud and the digital representation of his voice appeared in the green rectangle, followed by the yellow authenticator.
“Ha. Cue, cue. Wú ài, wú ài. Ess. Dubbel-ve. Te. Kwu. Ah, ah. De. See, see.”
When he finally finished, the screen returned to black.
“If you mess up any part of that log-in, the program launches a virus that destroys not just everything on your computer, but everything to which it’s networked. These guys don’t take any chances.”
“Who, exactly, are they?”
“I don’t know for sure. All of my transactions have been handled through intermediaries, and their chain of command is so long and winding that even they probably don’t know for sure, but we’re dealing with the kind of finances that limit the field to, at most, a couple hundred possibilities. Maybe even all of them. You guys need to move out of the webcam’s range. Now!”
Ramses and Mason took a step to either side as the black screen vanished. A different type of desktop opened. The address bar at the top showed a series of numbers and letters separated by dashes. There were four quadrants below it. The one on the top right was the largest and featured a line chart with numbers scrolling underneath it. There were twenty different graphs from which to choose, and this was number twelve. The bottom right quadrant looked like a chat window, only Mason couldn’t decipher any of the names, and their conversations were further encrypted. The bottom left featured a three-dimensional representation of a spinning globe surrounded by what looked like thousands of dots. The top left corner showed a picture of Gunnar from his own webcam, which had been accessed remotely by the program. A gorilla’s face was superimposed over his.
“For anonymity’s sake,” he said, as though reading Mason’s mind. The gorilla moved its lips, only with a slight delay. “Try to go anywhere you shouldn’t go on here and the gorilla face goes away and security is alerted to your identity and location, which you can see right there at the bottom of the screen in the GPS box.”
“Holy crap,” Mason said.
“Yeah, tell me about it. This interface uses a variation on the TCP/IP protocol called SPYDRR. Like spiders crawling across the web. This box in the upper right can show all of the world’s markets, plus an additional, unnamed market that only those who have access to this site can view. Unlike the others, this one doesn’t represent real-time trading. It’s almost like a predictive market. It shows the trades that the members here intend to make. Considering these are the people who control at least seventy-five percent of the money in the markets at any given time, what they determine here will find its real-world representation generally within a couple of months. But it’s fluid, so at any given time it’s just a snapshot of what will likely happen.”
“So the people doing this pretrading here could cause all of the international markets to crash and burn.”
“Or skyrocket. By essentially agreeing on a market forecast to which no one in the general public has access, they can not only control the world’s economy, but also carve off slices of the remaining twenty-five percent like prime rib. They set the trends that everyone else follows. They pull money out of high-tech stocks, and the rest of the world does the same. They throw money into their own portfolios, and everyone else follows like lemmings. And considering they own all of these companies anyway, all they’re really doing is moving their wallets from one pocket to the other, while investors are shoving their money into it as quickly as possible in between.”
“When you said that you could tell that something big is coming, this is what you were talking about, isn’t it?”
“Exactly. Just look at the names of the stocks scrolling past. These aren’t huge trades, nothing to draw a whole lot of attention. But we’re talking about the same names every day. I had a few theories, but I didn’t put the whole thing together until you said something about a weaponized virus, Mace. These guys are in the process of stockpiling large quantities of several particular types of stocks that on their own don’t really raise any red flags, but in conjunction, they scare the hell out of me.”
“Quit beating around the bush, Gunnar. What are they stockpiling?”
“Biotech, pharmaceuticals, oil, energy, gold and precious metals.”
“Jesus.”
Mason felt sick to his stomach.
“So what?” Ramses said. “What’s the big fucking deal? That’s smart money.”
“Think about it, Ramses.” Gunnar’s gorilla mouth moved on the screen as he spoke. “If something really bad happened, something capable of obliterating the existing societal infrastructure, who would be in a position to step up and take charge? These are the same people who already control the assets in the Federal Reserve and any number of foreign central banks. When they amass the crucial commodities that every individual needs, they’ll be in a position to remake the entire world in any image they want.”
And suddenly Mason understood exactly what all of this had to do with him. These were the commodities that would be in demand in the wake of a catastrophic, mass-casualty event.
Like a pandemic.
They were going to release the virus.