“Remotely? By whom?”
“This is the archived video footage, what Chief Brody gave me. But look carefully. Look at the road just as the car starts to skid. It’s hard to see in real-time, but not when you slow it way down.”
Decker stared at the screen. He could see Zimmerman’s Toyota as it moved in slow motion down the country road. Just before the car started to skid, a black mark appeared in the road — right in front of him, before Zimmerman had even put on the brakes! Another set of skid marks. Identical to the ones made by Zimmerman’s Land Cruiser. That’s when Decker remembered.
That guy with the sideburns, the one he’d interviewed at the tavern in Winhall. I almost skidded off the road there just a day or two earlier, he’d told him. Beaver came up out of the pond. I tried to avoid him and skidded. Bang! Hit the railing but didn’t punch through, thank goodness. It’s a dangerous bend. And someone had added, And you drive a Toyota as well. With the same brand of tires, no doubt, Decker thought.
“What you’re saying is that someone intentionally released the air in Zimmerman’s Toyota Land Cruiser in order to destabilize his car and cause his accident on exactly the same spot where someone else had had an accident and skidded because of some animal coming out into the road a day or so earlier.”
“That’s what I’m saying. Don’t you see? It’s perfect. If you’re going to kill someone, why not kill them on the same spot someone else had an accident. That way, it looks like some animal caused Zimmerman to jerk his own steering wheel, to cause his own accident, as opposed to some outside agent, someone who made him lose control at precisely that spot in order to cover his tracks.”
“But who issued the instruction to deflate the tire? Could you find that?”
“No. When I tried to track down the source, I couldn’t find the end of the root. It’s as if… as if the World Wide Web itself is responsible.”
“What does that mean?”
“I don’t know. It just doesn’t make sense. Whoever did this is a master,” she said. “He really knows how to code. It’s so…”
“So what?”
“So elegant, and yet so simple and clean. The kind of code that Zimmerman used to call ‘child’s play.’ And there’s more. Seeing what happened to Zimmerman made me wonder. What else was going on at that time in his life? Had he received any threats? Any ominous messages? And I don’t mean phantom trespassers.”
“Well, had he?”
“See for yourself. This video was Dropboxed to him only hours before his death.”
“What is it?”
“The video of a murder.”
CHAPTER 33
Lulu clicked at the keyboard and the video of Zimmerman’s Land Cruiser was replaced by the grainy image of a man holding the lens of a camera filming himself. He was a round-faced, Middle-Eastern-looking man in his late twenties with a thick nose, wispy black beard and mustaches. He was standing on a chair, holding the camera in his right hand, trying to fit it into position. A moment later, he stepped down off the chair, smiled up at the camera and gave it a thumbs-up.
“That makes six,” he said in English with a thick Scandinavian accent. “Now, I am covered completely. If anything happens, this footage and the scene that captures my…” He smiled grimly. “…my untimely end will be sent to you, Matt, automatically. I’ve arranged it. As you know, Piratbyrån and several other groups linked to Anonymous were creating botnets to help take down political enemies, such as when they tried to fuck over Julian by preventing donations to WikiLeaks. But, unbeknownst to me, unbeknownst to any of us, the code we were using included a snippet that gave control of the botnets to somebody else. Another source. A master controller. I still haven’t found out who, but I will. I will if it’s the last thing I do. The good news is, I found out what they’re doing. The bad news is, well… they know that I know. This is why I’m at the house at the sjö. To protect Alva and the family. This,” he said, waving at the cameras all around him, “is my insurance policy. Just in case. Or, perhaps, my revenge.”
The recording suddenly went grainy, like an old VHS tape. There was a flash of light and another camera picked up the scene. It was mounted outside on the porch of what appeared to be some kind of cabin in the woods, like a mökki or Swedish stuga, overlooking a lake. The same young Middle-Eastern-looking man was standing beside a glowing metal barrel. Inside the barrel, balanced against one side and away from the flames, was the flank of salmon nailed to a plank of wood. The man was tending the fish. He was also smoking a cigarette. He had a glove on his left hand, but his right hand with the cigarette was naked, exposed to the elements. He took another drag off his cigarette when another man loomed in from the side.
He was like a shadow. One minute, he wasn’t there. The next, he was standing over the Middle-Eastern-looking man, now apparently unconscious on the ground.
Decker gasped. As the stranger turned the body over, his face was captured by the camera.
The blond man with the scar from the hotel in Dandong. His Georgetown assassin!
The next thing Decker saw was the assassin stringing up the Middle-Eastern-looking man inside the cabin, using some sort of electrical cord. He made the scene look like a suicide.
The screen went grainy again. It flashed white for a second, when another camera picked up the narrative. Decker could just dimly see the receding back of the assassin as he trudged off, now wearing a rabbit fur hat, toward the lake. It had started to snow and it was difficult to track him through the heavy flakes as he stepped into a small boat, as he started the motor and slowly but surely made his way across the lake, finally vanishing behind a curtain of snow. Then the screen went black.
“The blond man,” said Decker, looking over at Lulu. “The guy who tried to kill me in Georgetown.”
“And Ibrahim Barzani,” said Lulu.
“What’s Piratbyrån and who’s Ibrahim Barzani? That’s a Kurdish name, isn’t it? What’s a Kurd doing at some stuga in Sweden?”
“The Piratbyrån — or Piracy Bureau, in English — is a play on the phrase antipiratbyrån, the lobbying group representing companies and organizations within the Swedish film and computer game industry commissioned to fight piracy. Piratbyrån was a group formed against such legislation. They fought for a free Net. Not free as in ‘free coffee,’ but as in the ‘free’ exchange of ideas. The group claimed that copyrights are largely a way for a few privileged businessmen to keep certain creative works under financial lock and key. Rarely do the artists themselves truly benefit. It’s the ones with the chokehold on distribution who clean up. The Web changed all that. Piratbyrån even developed a kind of anti-copyright protection logo called kopimi, pronounced and sometimes even spelled Copy Me, designed to signal that the work in question could and, in fact, should be copied. Kind of like the Creative Commons license except kopimi added that positive imperative.
“The kopimi concept and logo were created by Ibrahim Barzani back in ’05. His family had immigrated to Sweden from Kurdistan some years earlier. He was an artist at heart but he ended up founding both the Piratbyrån movement and Pirate Bay, the world’s largest illegal torrent downloading site. Bigger than Napster. Music and movies. Some say Piratbyrån was always designed to be a temporary group, to achieve a temporary political goal. But the final decision to disband came after Ibi Barzani died. Without the founding soul of the group, the movement could never be the same. His death was ruled a suicide. Barzani had always suffered from depression. After the company was shuttered, he and three other founders of Pirate Cove were sued and forced to pay major fines. Barzani was bankrupt, broken. And he had small children, so you can understand why the family wanted to keep details of his death out of the press. There was no hint of foul play.”