Kitabı oku: «Fall or, Dodge in Hell», sayfa 9

10

A few years earlier, Corvallis had been in a moderately serious car accident in stop-and-go traffic. He’d slowed down. The car behind him hadn’t—its driver was texting—and had rearended him hard enough to total Corvallis’s vehicle. Looking back on it later, the weird thing about it was how long it had taken for his brain to assemble anything like a correct picture of events. The first thing that had happened, as far as Corvallis’s mind-body system was concerned, was that his car’s headrest had struck him in the back of the skull hard enough that he could feel the little rivets in its frame. Then a bunch of other stuff had happened and he had been distracted for a while, but it wasn’t until maybe an hour later that he’d noticed his head hurting and reached up to find a bump on the back of his skull.

This was kind of like that. Reading the time stamp on Maeve’s message and her words my wifi just went down were the blow to the base of his skull, but it was a while before he really focused on it.

It was easy to find Maeve’s last name (Braden) and look up her address. She lived right in the middle of Moab, just a few blocks away from the offices of Canyonland Adventures. Whether she’d sent that text from her home or from the office, she’d probably been within a few hundred yards of ground zero.

He spent a while aimlessly clicking through Maeve’s various social media activities. On Lyke and other social media platforms, she had registered using variant spellings of her first name (Mab, Mabh, Madbh) and her last (Bradan, O Bradain). Apparently both names were Gaelic and so the spelling was all over the place. This was a common subterfuge used by people who didn’t want to sign up for social media accounts under their real names, but who understood that the fake name had to be convincing enough to pass an elementary screen by an algorithm somewhere; “Mickey Mouse” or “X Y” would be rejected, but “Mabh O Bradain” was fine. “Mab” was only one letter different from “Moab” and he wondered if Maeve had used it for that reason, as a sort of pun on her adopted home.

She was Australian, living in the States because of some family complications only murkily hinted at on social media. She was a double amputee—one of those people who suffered from a congenital malformation of the lower legs that made it necessary to remove them, below the knee, during childhood. She had been pursuing rowing and paddling sports for much of her twenty-nine years. Verna, her older sister in Adelaide, had stage 3 melanoma; Maeve had a lot to say about the importance of sun protection for outdoorsy people.

He had been clicking on links for a while without reading them. He had gone down a rat hole and found himself reading a page on modern high-tech prosthetic legs. He knew a couple of other people who used them, and had once invested in a startup that was trying to make better ones. So as random as it might have seemed, it felt like a point of connection between him and Maeve.

The jet was over the Bitterroots, aimed south-southwest. Corvallis pulled up a map and zoomed it to the point where he could see San Jose in the bottom left, Moab in the bottom right, and Missoula up top.

He unbuckled his seat belt and walked forward past the little galley, where Bonnie was making coffee. She had kicked off her high-heeled pumps and switched to her sensible in-flight footwear. She looked up at him, moderately startled; the toilet was in the back, he had no particular reason for being up at this end of the plane.

Procedures on private jets were pretty relaxed. Cockpit doors weren’t armored, and frequently were left open so that curious passengers could look out the front. At the moment, this one was closed. Corvallis hesitated before knocking on it. He was hesitating because he was about to make a decision he couldn’t unmake, and he knew that everyone was going to be disconcerted by it, and he wasn’t good at that kind of thing—at the mere fact of making himself the center of attention. So before knocking he had to engage in a bit of mental prep that had become a habit in the last few years. He was visualizing Richard Forthrast, hale and healthy, standing exactly where Corvallis was standing right now, confidently knocking on the door. Hell, Dodge wouldn’t even knock, he would just open it. He would greet Frank and Lenny, the pilot and copilot, and he would say what he had to say.

Bonnie was giving him an odd look.

He smiled and nodded at her, then rapped on the door. Then he opened it.

“Frank and Lenny,” he said. “According to my map, Moab is approximately the same distance from where we are now as San Jose. Therefore, we ought to have enough fuel on board to fly to Moab. I would like to file a new flight plan and go to Moab.”

They looked at him like he was crazy. As he’d known they would. But the reality of it wasn’t as bad as he’d feared. It never was. The anticipation was always worse.

“Moab, where the bomb went off?” asked Frank, who was the alpha pilot.

“Yes. That Moab.”

“I think that’s shut down,” said Lenny, the beta pilot. “I mean, the FAA won’t let us near there.”

“Do you know that for a fact, Lenny, or is it just a reasonable surmise based on news and social media stuff?”

Lenny looked to Frank.

“Well, we haven’t actually contacted the FAA, if that’s what you mean,” Frank said.

“I would like you to change course for Moab, and file the flight plan, and see what happens,” Corvallis said. “If the FAA won’t allow us to land there, maybe we can fly past it en route to somewhere farther away, and look down at it. All I really need is to see the town from above.”

Frank and Lenny looked at each other. Frank nodded.

“I’ll get on it, boss,” said Lenny.

“Okay. Let me know how it goes. I’m really interested to hear any particulars about how the FAA behaves when you run this by them.”

Corvallis got back to his laptop, and its live Miasmic news feeds, in time to see a big military chopper lifting off from the roof of that casino in Las Vegas. Dangling below it was something that looked heavy. It flew off in the direction of the nearby air force base, which was described as a top secret facility that had once been used for nuclear weapons testing. The all-clear was sounded in Vegas. But immediately it was swamped, on the news feeds, by reports of a precisely similar incident taking shape on the top floor of a skinny residential tower under construction in midtown Manhattan. This had to duel for airtime with shocking new footage just coming in from Moab, where, for the first time since it had all started, we were now seeing photos of horribly burned victims, and shaky video of their being unloaded from medical choppers. From outside the cordon, downwind of Moab, bloggers on horseback and all-terrain vehicles were now reporting elevated radiation levels. The mainstream media were ignoring, or actively suppressing, these reports, presumably because the government had admonished them not to spread panic. But social media were more effective at spreading what passed for news and so it scarcely mattered.

Someone had finally got close enough to Moab to do a flyover with a drone. They couldn’t get too close because of military units that were interdicting travel in the area, and also because they didn’t want to expose themselves to radiation, but they were able to transmit some footage of the ruined town. The low frame rate, the bricky pixels, the compression artifacts in the image, the tendency of the camera to be aimed in the wrong direction as it flew through smoke and dust, all contributed to a feeling of cinema verité that was beginning to strike his increasingly jaded eye as too good to be true.

Keeping an eye on Lyke’s internal email system, Corvallis noticed that Jason Crabb was online. Jason was a systems administrator for Nubilant who had jumped to Lyke in the wake of the acquisition. It had given him a pretext for moving to the Bay Area, which he’d been wanting to do anyway, because of a complicated girlfriend situation. Corvallis clicked on the little video camera icon next to Jason’s name. After a minute or so of user interface fuckery, he found himself looking at a moving image of Jason, who was sitting in his girlfriend’s bed, propped up on a lot of pillows. The upward camera angle of his laptop made Jason’s beard huge and magnificent in a rufous shaft of morning sunlight. He did not greet Corvallis but just stared at him, alert and expectant. On a day such as this one, “C-plus” would not have taken the unusual step of initiating a video call unless it was important.

“Suppose there’s a company in Moab with a website, or some other kind of Internet presence of any kind whatsoever for that matter,” Corvallis began.

“Yeah?”

“It’s off the air now, let’s say.”

“No shit!”

“Okay, but pretend for a moment we don’t actually know why. There are two possible explanations for its being off the air. You need to get all Sherlock and figure out which is the truth.”

“Okay—??”

“Scenario one is that Moab got nuked and the wires, or the optical fibers, don’t even reach into town anymore, they are just dangling from a burning telegraph pole in the desert. Scenario two is that Moab is still there but the ISP that serves it is being crushed under a DDoS attack.” Meaning, as Jason would know, “distributed denial of service.” “Or for that matter any kind of remote hack that would shut it down for a while. Is there a way you could distinguish between those two scenarios without getting out of bed?”

“I have to pee,” Jason said.

“You know what I mean.”

“Probably.”

“Okay, please do that and get back to me,” Corvallis said, and disconnected.

Lots more was happening in Manhattan now, on news and social media sites, on talk radio. The wave had not crested yet. If Corvallis were among the billions who actually believed that Moab had been nuked, he’d have been fully absorbed. As it was he found himself in a weirdly peaceful and calm state.

“I called an audible,” Frank was saying to him.

Corvallis looked up to see the pilot standing in the aisle, looking down at him. His brain slowly caught up. Calling an audible was some kind of sports-based metaphor. It meant that Frank had made a decision on his own—improvised in a way he hoped Corvallis would later approve of.

“I filed a flight plan to El Paso.”

“El Paso?”

“It’ll take us near Moab. Near enough that we can look down on it like you said. But we’ll be at forty thousand feet—above the box.”

“The box?”

“The box of airspace around Moab where the FAA doesn’t want us to go.”

“El Paso’s a lot farther away,” Corvallis pointed out.

Frank nodded. “The only thing that’s a little sketchy about this is that we really don’t have that much fuel. I mean, we could stretch it, but we’d be in the red zone. So we’ll have to land somewhere else, short of El Paso.”

“That’s okay,” Corvallis said, “everything will be different by then.”

“It’s okay for you,” Frank said, “but it makes me look like a fucking idiot for filing a flight plan that doesn’t make sense fuel-wise.”

“Just tell me who I need to talk to. I’ll take responsibility.” Corvallis generally didn’t like looking people in the eye, but from watching Dodge he knew that there were certain times when it was a deal-breaker. So he forced himself to look Frank in the eye. “I will personally take responsibility for this and I will get you off the hook.” Frank shrugged, raised his eyebrows, and went back to the cockpit.

Corvallis had been thinking about a detail that had passed under his gaze while he’d been clicking around learning about Maeve Braden. He had to dig surprisingly deep into his browser history to find it. This was complicated by the fact that he had been checking her out both on the public Miasma and in Lyke’s secure file system. Eventually he tracked it down in the latter. It was the personal data record associated with her account—the result of her having filled out a form, years ago, when she’d joined Lyke, and having clicked the “submit” button. Which, come to think of it, was a pretty strange bit of semantics. But anyway, she had listed several telephone numbers, including one that began with “011,” which was the prefix for dialing international calls from the United States. He had already learned of her Australian background and so upon scanning this for the first time he’d made the obvious assumption that it was an Oz number. But it wouldn’t make any particular sense for her to go to the trouble of entering such a number into her profile unless she was actually spending a lot of time in Australia.

On a second look, the country code was 881, which wasn’t Australia; it was a special code used by satellite phones.

Corvallis wasn’t hugely knowledgeable about sat phones, but he knew a couple of people who owned them, either just because they were geeks or because they did a lot of travel in places with no cell phone coverage. It seemed pretty obvious that Maeve was one of the latter. Her whole job was taking groups of tourists on trips deep into the canyons of the Colorado River, where cell phone use was out of the question. Of course Canyonlands Adventures would own sat phones, and of course they’d issue them to their guides.

Whether she would keep the thing turned on, and within easy reach, was another question. For all he knew, it might have been turned off and buried in a waterproof bag at the bottom of a raft. But then it might get dumped overboard if the raft flipped—which was exactly the kind of situation where you’d need it. It would make more sense for the lead guide to carry it on her person.

It was worth a go, anyway. Corvallis’s cell phone wouldn’t work on the plane, but he had pretty good Internet and he could make voice calls through his laptop. He plugged in his headphones for better audio, booted up the relevant app, and typed in the number. There was a long wait—much longer than for conventional calls.

“Hell-low!?” said a woman. She sounded Australian, and pissed off that someone would call her. In the background it was possible to hear other people chattering and laughing. Corvallis visualized them on the raft, in a quiet stretch of the Colorado. He heard a splash and a kerplunk. Someone had jumped in for a swim.

Just from this, Corvallis had already learned what he needed to know: that Moab had not been nuked. But it seemed only polite to explain himself. “Maeve, I’m sorry to bother you but this is important. You don’t know me. My name is Corvallis Kawasaki.”

“As in the town of Corvallis? Oregon?”

“Yes. You can Google me when you get home, I’m an executive at Lyke. The social media company.”

“You work for Lyke?”

“Yes.”

“Is there something going wrong with my account? Did I get hacked or something?” He liked the way she asked it. Her tone wasn’t apprehensive. It was more as if she would find it wryly amusing to have been hacked.

“No. Your account is fine. Everything is fine where you’re concerned.”

She laughed. “Then why are you calling me? To ask me out on a bloody date?”

“That would be a violation of our confidentiality policies,” Corvallis responded. “This is about something else that you should probably be aware of.” And he went on to explain, as best as he could without taking all day, what had been happening. During this time, Maeve didn’t say much. It was a lot to take in. And for all of its complexity, for all of the millions of people on the Miasma who sincerely believed in its reality, it must have seemed ridiculous and dreamlike to her, gliding down the Colorado with her sun hat pulled down over her head and her paddle on her lap, looking at the ancient rocks, watching the Jones family gambol in the cool water.

“At about five twenty this morning, you were still in or near Moab, right?”

“I was at the office,” she said, “loading up the van.”

“In downtown Moab.”

“Yeah.”

“Did you see anything like a bright flash in the sky?” He already knew the answer, but he had to ask.

“No. There was no such thing.”

“But the Internet had gone down.”

“I’d got up at four thirty and it worked. Half an hour later it had crashed. Nothing.”

“Did you try to use your cell phone at all?”

“The Joneses did. They tried to ring me at five thirty, five forty, something like that. Nothing worked.”

“Why’d they want to call you?”

“To tell me they’d be late.”

“But you met at the sandbar and got off without anything unusual happening.”

“Yeah.”

“And the sandbar is, what, only a couple of miles outside of Moab?”

“That’s right. Hang on.” The phone went shuffly/muffly. Corvallis heard enough snatches of Maeve’s voice to guess that she was trying to explain matters to her clients, who had overheard enough to be curious.

“I’m here,” she assured him.

“Maeve? There’s a lot more we could say to each other,” Corvallis said, “but I’m betting that the Joneses have friends and family who know they were in Moab this morning and who are frantic with worry right now. You should probably hang up and call them.”

“Why haven’t they called already, I wonder?”

“They probably don’t have the sat phone number. To get the sat phone number, they’d have to reach your main office, and …”

“And all the comms are down, yeah. All right. How can I call you back, Corvallis?”

He gave her his number, and she recited it back to him, using the quasi-military “niner” in place of “nine,” which he found unaccountably confidence inspiring. Then she hung up without formalities.

While all of this had been going on, Jason Crabb had emailed him back to tell him what he already knew, namely that the communications blackout in Moab appeared to be the result of a conventional DDoS attack.

Corvallis called Laurynas, his boss, the fifty-ninth-richest man in the world, who answered the phone with “Don’t sell any of your stock.”

“Huh?”

“After the stock market reopens, that is. Legal’s sending out a company-wide blast.”

It took Corvallis a few seconds to catch up with the logic. “You know the Moab event is a hoax.”

“Yeah. It is becoming increasingly obvious.”

“You’re worried it’s going to be a bloodbath for our stock. Because so much of it is happening on our network. We look negligent. People will sue us.”

“But for now that is insider knowledge, C, and if you sell any of your stock, you are insider trading.”

“Got it.”

“Where are you, man? Other than on a plane.”

“Headed for Moab.”

Laurynas laughed. Corvallis had the sense it was the first time he had laughed all day. “No shit?”

“When I got suspicious I asked the pilots to plot a new course.”

“That is awesome.” Laurynas was ten years younger than him. “You going to try to land at Moab?”

“Probably not. No real plan yet.”

“You’re just calling an audible. That. Is. Awesome!”

“Thanks.”

“When did you first get suspicious, C?”

“At a subconscious level? It was all that shit about the Moabites.”

“What are you talking about?”

“In the video from the terrorists, where they take responsibility for the attack?”

“Yeah. It’s a pretty long sermon,” Laurynas said, a little defensively. “I didn’t have time to sit through the whole thing.”

“He quotes a lot of Old Testament crap about the ancient Moabites and how they were apparently the bad guys. Born of incest or something.”

“As if that justifies the attack on Moab, Utah.”

“Yeah, and on one level I’m thinking it sounds like the usual convoluted jihad-think but at the same time I’m like, ‘Come on, man, you could have nuked any old town you chose, and most would be easier to reach than Moab.’ I mean, why even bother with a warning shot?”

“They were trying too hard,” said Laurynas, getting it. “Piling on a lot of verbiage to explain why they picked that town.”

“Yeah. As if they were worried that people would see through it. When the real reason’s obvious.”

“Yeah. If they did a nuke hoax in Paterson, New Jersey, people in the next town over would just check it out with fucking binoculars and say, ‘Nope, still there.’ It had to be somewhere isolated.”

“It’s the key to the whole plan,” Corvallis said.

“Yeah, it sets up the red-eye flight, the truck driver, and the rest. These guys are good.”

“So if I were you, with the resources you’ve got, I’d be digging into the fake footage, the burn victims …”

“We found some metadata suggesting it came out of a Nollywood special effects house.”

“You mean Bollywood?”

“Nollywood. November. Not Bravo. Nigerian film industry. Huge.”

“Jeez, why is it always Nigeria?”

“It isn’t,” Laurynas said flatly. “This is classic misdirection. Whoever did this knows that, when it comes to light, people will focus way too much attention on the Nigeria angle.”

“Well, so what do you want me to do?” Corvallis asked, after they had both sat there quietly pondering Nigeria for some moments.

“Save the company.”

“And how do you think I might achieve that?”

“By getting to Moab before the president of the United States gets there. Or, barring that, soon.”

“How does that save the company?”

“When people understand that this is a hoax, burning feces are going to fall out of the sky and bury us to a depth of six Empire State Buildings,” Laurynas said. “The best we can do is spread the blame—point out that all the other networks got used in the same way. This becomes infinitely more effective if we can say, ‘And look, our dude C was on the ground in Moab before sundown, personally establishing the ground truth.’”

Laurynas was a Lithuanian basketball prodigy who had attended Michigan on a scholarship and then wrong-footed everyone by turning out to be actually smart. He would answer to “Lawrence.” He had picked up American tech-bro speech pretty accurately, but his accent broke the surface when he was envisioning something that he thought would be awesome.

“Before sundown?” Corvallis repeated.

“That would be preferable. Darkness, video, not a good fit.” Laurynas was laughing as he hung up. He had the big man’s joviality when it came to the doings of small people.

On a Miasma news feed, some scientists in white lab coats were giving a press conference in front of a backdrop covered with many copies of the logo and name of the Los Alamos National Laboratory. Corvallis listened to it for a while. It was perfect. The actors portraying the scientists were well cast: There was the eminence grise who didn’t say much but who conveyed huge gravitas and authority when he did. The engaging young beard who did most of the talking and reminded you of your favorite science teacher who rode around campus on a recumbent bicycle. The demure, middle-aged, maternal, but still-kind-of-hot woman. The introverted Asian dude showing flashes of wry humor. Whoever had produced this counterfeit had completely nailed the sound: you could hear chairs scraping, shutters clicking, fingers pounding laptop keyboards, people’s cell phones going off, all conveying the sense that a hundred journalists were crammed into the room. The payload—the informational warhead on the tip of this social media rocket—was that they had performed isotopic analysis of fallout collected by volunteers downwind of Moab and confirmed that it matched the fingerprint of half a dozen Soviet-era suitcase nukes that had gone missing in Uzbekistan some years ago.

Even as C-plus was admiring the quality of the pseudoscientific dialogue being spouted by these actors, the “news conference” was suddenly “shut down” as the room was invaded by a squad of beefy-looking guys in beards and wraparound sunglasses who looked like they had just stepped out of a casting call for a SEAL Team Six movie. Their leader’s face was visible only for a few frames as he reached out and swiped at the camera’s lens. The camera ended up on the floor, sideways, transmitting a close-up of a knocked-over Starbucks cup and some chair legs, with murky sound of the scientists protesting as they were hustled out of the room.

A logo at the bottom of the screen claimed it was live on CNN. Which was by definition wrong, since Corvallis wasn’t actually watching it on CNN. He had found it on YouTube by clicking on a Twitter link in which some concerned citizen watchdog claimed that they had captured this sensational footage earlier on the live CNN feed and were just posting it for the benefit of the general population and that everyone should download it and copy it and post it everywhere before the government suppressed the news.

Out of curiosity, Corvallis went over to CNN’s Twitter feed and found a tweet from twenty minutes ago insisting that the press conference footage on YouTube was not genuine CNN content, had never aired on CNN, and was some sort of hoax. It had already drawn thousands of angry and skeptical replies from people saying that CNN was obviously being controlled by deep-state actors.

Temporarily at a loss for anything to do, Corvallis rewound the fake press conference video to a close-up of the woman scientist, took a screen grab of her face, and pasted it into Lyke’s face-recognition app. Within seconds he was reading the IMDb profile of this actress, a veteran of numerous television commercials and a few indie films. He didn’t waste his time repeating the experiment with the other members of the cast. Or for that matter with the scruffy young actor who had climbed off the red-eye earlier and released the mushroom cloud footage to the world. Or the truck driver in Utah. Or Larry Proctor, the blogger. It would be the same with all of them. And when the hoax was discovered and quashed, all of them would be tracked down by vengeful Miasma sleuths and all of them would probably tell a similar story: they had been recruited by a production company working on a low-budget indie thriller, they had gone to certain soundstages and recited certain lines. They and the production crew had all been paid in some untraceable way, through Bitcoin or whatever, and they’d moved on to the next job.

A text came through from Laurynas: We found the people who made the mushroom cloud sim—a CGI house in the Philippines.

He Googled Moab hoax and found a basically infinite amount of stuff already posted. Much of it was right for the wrong reasons. Ninety percent of it was about the bioweapon theory.

These people—the people who had done this—were awesome. They knew that some people would see through the hoax and denounce it as such. Those skeptics couldn’t be silenced. But they could be drowned out. So, the hoaxers had inoculated the Miasma with a ready-made hoax narrative that was obviously ridiculous, and tailor-made to appeal to the vociferous citizens of Crazytown. Right now everyone’s uncle Harry—the angry truther at Thanksgiving dinner—was typing as fast as he could with the caps lock key in effect. If you were a member of the reality-based community who suspected that it was a hoax, you had to wade through a hundred zombie-related postings in order to find one that made sense, and wherever you went on the Miasma to argue for a skeptical and reasoned approach, you were lumped in with the zombie truthers, ridiculed and downvoted. As an example, he found a thread in which zombie truthers were being shouted down by people who had just seen the fake Los Alamos news conference on YouTube and were using it as evidence that Moab had been nuked by foreign terrorists, not by the United States government.

Frank’s voice came through on the intercom. “Moab is under cloud cover.”

Of course it was under cloud cover. Corvallis wondered if the authors of this hoax had waited for a cloudy day in Moab before pulling the trigger.

He went up to the cockpit so that he could look out the windshield over the pilots’ shoulders. The weather was generally clear, but clouds were stuffed like cotton into low places in the landscape, including the valley of a prominent river that Corvallis assumed was the Colorado. No-fly zone or not, people could fly over Moab all day long and not be able to come back with a definitive answer as to whether it still existed.

“We need to land,” Corvallis announced.

“The Moab airport is closed,” Frank told him.

Without thinking, Corvallis said what Dodge would have said: “I didn’t say anything about an airport. See if there’s an airstrip or a straight stretch of highway.”

“Highway!?”

“I might be able to contact someone who knows the area,” Corvallis said, and stepped out of the cockpit. His phone was ringing. Or rather, the app running on his laptop that did what a phone did, except over the Internet. He strode up the aisle and pivoted to look at the screen. A window had popped up, making him aware of an incoming call from an international number with an 881 area code.

Corvallis fell in love with Maeve.

It was another one of those transitions like being rear-ended and clubbed in the base of the skull by the headrest. To say that he wasn’t aware of it would’ve been wrong. It was palpable. But the part of his nervous system that had registered it was way down in the boiler room, as it were, sending out email alerts that would take a long time to make their way through the spam filters and middle-management layers of his brain. Weeks might pass before the meeting in which, sitting in the boardroom of his soul, Corvallis Kawasaki would be confronted by a PowerPoint slide, projected eight feet wide, announcing in no-nonsense sans-serif type, “IN LOVE WITH MAEVE.” What he had just experienced was more like the subtle click of a really well-engineered piece of machinery being snapped together.

He plugged in his headphones and answered the call. “Maeve?”