But there might still be useful intelligence here. The “Cult of Efficiency” was meeting here for a reason. With several other razorbacks patrolling the perimeter, Loki figured he had a while before local police had the courage to move past the carnage at the front gate.
He kicked over the butchered corpse of a husky Latin American man in an expensive suit. The man had been slashed open neck to groin, spine deep—then hip to shoulder. Beneath him on the floor was a blood-soaked map. Loki kicked the carcass aside and overturned a dining room table to reveal a topographical map. He started to notice a collection of large-format survey maps of the Midwestern United States spread about the room. They were torn and stained with blood.
What are you planning, Major?
He snapped several high-definition photos with his HUD display. Loki then reached a black-gloved hand out to turn on a layer of D-Space—one that revealed all wireless consumer electronics data emitted in his vicinity. With it, he immediately saw the mobile equipment identifiers (MEIDs) of several phones floating above the dead men in D-Space, as well as Bluetooth IDs to various headsets and wireless devices around the bungalow. He could also see SSIDs for nearby Wi-Fi access points—floating in three-dimensional space as call-outs.
Loki activated a darknet telecommunications search portal, which appeared as a single orange ring of light floating in space a foot or so in front of him. It was a digital receptacle into which he swept each of the MEIDs of the dead men’s phones with a wave of his gloved hand. The orange circle flashed and in a moment shrank, transforming into a series of six names associated with those handsets. Aliases, of course, but Loki wasn’t looking for their names. He wanted their social network.
Loki turned to look at the shattered French doors, the curtains swaying in a tropical breeze. The Major had been here, and he couldn’t have gotten far.
Loki pushed aside his D-Space portal app and brought up an overhead satellite photo of his current GPS position. The image of the bungalow’s roof floated as a D-Space object, in a private translucent dimension a foot and a half in front of him, where he could work with it. With a couple of clicks he overlaid mobile phone tracking data from four major telecom carriers onto the image of the bungalow roof. He adjusted a slider to move back in time from the present, showing various dots—each representing a phone handset—moving around the bungalow. There were six individuals. Then he spotted a seventh handset coming in from the patio right about the time his lead razorback hit the door.
Loki zoomed out and let the clock run forward—watching the dot representing that same phone handset move through the French doors, and then across the grounds toward the parking lot. At that point the phone disappeared from the map.
Loki rewound the timeline and clicked on the dot—retrieving its MEID, which he then swept into his search portal list.
He now had seven identities. He examined the last name—The Major’s current alias: Anson Gregory Davis.
Loki immediately sent the identity out to the darknet feed dedicated to finding The Major. He knew hundreds of thousands of people were monitoring it. Perhaps The Major would make the mistake of using a credit card from this identity within the next few hours. Likewise, he knew they’d analyze the purchase patterns of this identity, as well. Did The Major buy a coffee at the same time each day? Did he drink a rare type of scotch? Smoke a rare cigar—or have any other unique tastes that couldn’t be masked by a false identity? One they could use to detect him wherever he reappeared? If so, the crowd would find it.
In the meantime, Loki wanted to see what sort of friends “Mr. Davis” had been speaking with. Loki clicked on the name and it quickly expanded into a map of variously sized dots radiating out from a central hub—like the map of a star system. Loki knew each dot represented a unique phone number that The Major had called with this specific handset. The size of the dot represented how often he had called it. With another click, Loki examined the calls made by The Major’s most talked-to colleagues. Intelligence experts called this sort of map a “community of interest,” and each level of detail was called a “generation.” He was now looking at a “two-generation community of interest” for The Major. Loki laid the calling data over a map of the world and noticed a very even geographic spread within the U.S.—plus a few dozen calls overseas to Europe, Asia, and the Middle East.
Loki added the second-generation data for the most talked-to colleagues, and suddenly a pattern began to form. Indeed, it was focused throughout the Midwestern states—Kansas, Iowa, Missouri. Bringing up the third generation made the pattern even more clear.
There were operations under way in the Midwest. He stared hungrily at the tiny dots. Each one represented a person—a person who was now known to him and who could be tracked down. At this level of abstraction they looked looked like ants.
Ants that were about to get squashed . . .
Chapter 12: // Masterwork
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The GamerZ faction has launched the open-source Burning Man Project with the express aim of “resurrecting” Roy Merritt as a system-level D-Space avatar. The planned avatar would obey the eleven principles of the Order of Merritt and be imbued with powers as participants donate levels. The project was made feasible through the recent discovery of comprehensive biometric data for the late Roy Merritt in the Building Twenty-Nine security database. The data includes body and facial geometry, textures, voice, gait, and other info. Contributors need a five-star reputation score and at least fifteen levels of proficiency in their primary class.
Situated just across the Pearl River Delta from Hong Kong, Shenzhen was a city of migrants. Declared a Special Economic Zone by the Chinese government in 1980, it was an experiment in limited capitalism—and had grown with astonishing speed. Fueled by cheap labor, Shenzhen’s population exploded from three hundred thousand to over twelve million people in less than three decades. State-of-the-art factory complexes producing goods for Western companies covered mile after mile in the northern reaches of the city, away from the tourism- and trade-centered southern districts.
Jon Ross had been here for only a few weeks, and already he liked it better than Beijing. The air was better, for one thing, and it had milder, subtropical weather. It was a city made for the type of person he was pretending to be—a thirty-year-old, successful entrepreneur looking for manufacturing capacity. To such a person, Shenzhen held many charms, not the least of which was cheap, skilled labor.
China was no longer punching out plastic trinkets. They made iPods, computers, and medical devices here now. High-quality merchandise. If you were making shirts or plastic patio chairs, you brought your business to Vietnam or Pakistan. At least for now.
Ross gazed out the window. Thousands of blue-uniformed, female factory workers with multicolored ID tags clipped to their pockets surged around Ross’s chauffeured Buick Regal. As they pressed past in the narrow lane between production buildings and dormitories, the car’s blacked-out windows hid Ross from their view. His driver honked the horn repeatedly and cursed in Mandarin as they inched along. Ross studied the tableau of humanity as it squeezed by—or he by it. It was hard to tell which. Up close, every worker was distinct in some way. Their eyes. Their expression. But in a few moments each disappeared into the crowd.