CBD: Why was that?
MS. COHEN: The bodyguard thought it was to avoid law enforcement. I think it was more than that. I think Fawkes was planning to ride out offshore the societal chaos he was inducing. With everything Angel began to put together, it was clear that he was planning some big event, and it would go down soon.
CBD: What else?
MS. COHEN: Print and DNA samples linked two of the men onboard to the public assassinations. And we matched Fawkes’ DNA as well — same as in the mask in the Bridgeport scene.
CBD: Where the shootings occurred?
MS. COHEN: Right.
CBD: But you still hadn’t found him in any database?
MS. COHEN: No. Might be he was off the radar. He was young, maybe never caught in criminal activity. Another possibility we considered is that he scrubbed his files.
CBD: Scrubbed them?
MS. COHEN: Fawkes was a master hacker. Databases are often too easily accessible online. Really — do you know of a single major private or governmental organization that hasn’t been hacked in the last ten years? If he knew he was in certain systems, he might have found his way into them and deleted all information about himself. He could do it, I don’t doubt that. Either way, we had nothing. And now we had stirred the hornet’s nest.
CBD: Meaning?
MS. COHEN: Until that point, we had been only a blip on his radar. Someone probing too much in the wrong places. Even that was enough to try and kill us. But now — we’d entered his space, killed his bodyguards, nearly grabbed him off that damn boat. If he didn’t have that escape drone on the roof, we would have. Now he was pissed, and he came after us.
CBD: First with Angel?
MS. COHEN: Well, she was the thorn in his side that kept getting worse. But everything just began to escalate at that point. Within the next few days we’d be hit, and absolutely devastating attacks happened across the world. And if it hadn’t been for the information Angel obtained from the worm dissection, we would have lost even more.
CBD: So she was key.
MS. COHEN: [INAUDIBLE] Here we go again. Yes, she was key. So were John, and Frank, and JP. And certainly Gabriel and Mary.
CBD: The aliases—
MS. COHEN: Just stop. I’m not going there. Look, we worked as a team. A damn good team. What happened next just motivated us more. That’s when John’s idea took root, when we agreed to try it. Fawkes was hitting the world where it hurt. This time, we were going to hit him where it hurt.
41
He spoke to them on five different encrypted video conferencing calls. They were hired guns and bombers, assassins trained under diverse conditions spanning the military to organized crime. He’d baited them through the underground online marketplaces with money few could refuse. He’d filtered through information searches, background checks, and video chat interviews. He’d tested each of them with small scale operations, sifting the wheat from the chaff, identifying the unreliable, the unstable, the less competent, and those who reported back to others and revealed themselves as informants. Sometimes he was forced to erase those who could pose a threat.
The few who survived the process were moved like chess pieces, directed remotely so that groups were formed, hierarchies established, rules set and punished harshly when broken. And always there was money. Hard to comprehend amounts of money, accounts protected from the worm scattered across the world. Houses and lands were purchased. Protected lives and identities created and promised. All for the taking should a final set of missions be accomplished. And all to be snatched away once the missions completed. He was fighting against the plutocracy and he was sure as hell not going to create another one.
Fawkes adjusted the mask over his face. A mask of a smiling, goateed madman from another age, always in place, his identity revealed only to those bodyguards who worked directly with him. He prepared a final address. Now he would move the strikes forward quickly in time. Now he would give a last set of instructions for the beginning stages of the end. Dangerous people at the FBI and other agencies had forced his hand sooner than he would have liked. He preferred careful probing of systems and weakness, test shots and stress tests that allowed him to screen his people as much as the target systems. He liked to thoroughly debug the code.
But the time for precise experimentation was gone. The time for drastic action had revealed itself. He could not afford another near disaster like that on the boat. How had they found him so quickly? Attacked him so easily? He had taken every precaution! Every trace erased from the digital world. But he was clearly not careful enough. Which meant he had to hurry. There was no telling from what direction they were coming, what flaws in the program were still lurking, waiting to collapse like poorly designed walls under siege.
Chaos was his ally. The more dysfunctional the world became around them, the less the governmental apparatus could use its considerable firepower to find and kill him. The attacks would begin there with the heads of the hydra in Washington. They thought they had been attacked! But they had seen only the weak pieces, a feint to test the strength of their defenses. And those defenses had been found lacking.
But the hydra’s handlers were not in Washington, but Europe and Asia. And so he would begin the dismantling of the European society and destabilization of China and the lesser economies. There could be war. These disturbances might be enough.
Otherwise, he would bring the final direct attack. He would darken America and plunge the nation into complete anarchy. Moments before the lights went off in the centers of power in the United States, the signal would be given for the worm to complete its final function. The digital mind of the planet, on which all the modern societies rested, that calculated trade and commerce, that built buildings and cars, that became nearly a higher order organism of parsing ideas and thoughts in a fiber-optic neural network, a brain beyond anything the solar system had likely ever seen — it would die. Erased. Unmade in a cascade of deletion that would render them beyond salvage. Once the signal was given, the mad mind of Earth would die.
Only then might there be a chance for something more worthy, more pure to rise from the ashes. Fawkes didn’t care if it was Humans 2.0 or the dolphin beta release. It had to be something new. Utterly new. The corrupt, cancerous, and insane thing called modern culture, what the deluded called modern civilization, had to be sterilized. Every cell wiped to prevent reinfection.
The worm would do that. The final cargo to be uploaded was designed and long perfected. It would exploit the enormous security and logical holes in the neuronal system of the world mind and scramble it, then like an acid eat away at the fibers and proteins until even the very DNA was digested.
Fawkes smiled behind the mask as he spoke to his blind tools. The FBI group had nearly ended it, but had only accelerated the date of doom.
He would start with them. He would pay that bitch in the bowels of Manhattan a short visit. Then he would show her who really ran things in cyberspace.
“Knock, knock, Angel.”
42
The names unfurled across the screen like entries in some doomsday book.
It was the new month, November first at three in the morning, and Angel had spent it deep in the basement of the FBI building. She rubbed her eyes. The holes across her left ear were swollen and red from the piercings that had been squashed as she slept during the last worm decryption job. Running one hand over the orange stubble of hair on her scalp, she clicked with the other to silence the alert tone from the computer that had called her out of some murky dream — only to stare at another nightmare.