Still, he had a job to do – and it wasn’t finished yet. And might not be, for several days, despite the narrow timetable his employer had given him. They would not be happy about this. His display pinged with an alert, even as his wife hung up.
“Speak of the Devil,” he murmured. Time to make the call. He did so at the same time every forty-eight hours, as per the standard contract. He moved the spiderbot aside and reached down for another tray. This one held an assemblage of Optik external devices, mostly stolen, some purchased. Each was linked to the others by a network of cables and wiring.
He was still coming to grips with the new tech. He felt like a man out of time, in more ways than one. But he was learning. Even in privacy mode Optiks collected baseline metadata, recording everything including your location. They were flares, lighting up the darkness of the information superhighway. If your Optik was on, if your implant was in place and functional, it was transmitting information. But there were ways around that, if you had the wherewithal.
The first was to have a black market implant, rather than the standard model. Something not registered in any database – or registered to someone else. Coyle’s implant had been taken from a dead man. It transmitted ghost-data, created by a sophisticated bot-program, thus forming a false profile. What he ate, where he went, his favourite films, all of it a smokescreen. Randomised, but pattern consistent.
The second method was to create a crude refractive array. You couldn’t cut the flow of data, not without alerting someone, but you could control it – dilute it. It was like diverting a river. Optiks were programmed to synch with every other Optik in range. With the right program, you could send out a flood of misinformation, drowning the signal. And the more Optiks that were synched, the faster it worked.
Each Optik was comprised of two parts – the implant and the external device. On their own, the external devices were basically fancy paperweights. But if you managed to steal one, you could skim-clone the user’s browsing data – including any saved passwords and the like. You could also use them to create falsified online identities. The identities wouldn’t stand up to human scrutiny, but they could easily pass most bot-detection algorithms.
Using the external devices, the falsified identities and a signal-splitter app he’d procured on the dark web, he could create a primitive overlay network, allowing him to feed false data from every direction, obscuring his location in a flood of fake news, flame wars and denial-of-service blitz-attacks. In this age of constant noise, he’d found that the best place to hide was amidst the cacophony.
It had all been so simple once upon a time. Burner phones had been cheap and plentiful. But these days, having a phone would be considered suspicious. He set his Optik down near the array, and let it synch to the others, as it was programmed to do.
As it did so, his display broke into multiple windows. It had taken some time to get used to using multiple displays. Thankfully, the flow of information was minimal – mostly GPS data. It still gave him a migraine if he used it for longer than a few minutes.
Once the synching was complete, he lifted the Optik on the far end of the array and made the call. There was only one number programmed into it – encrypted, of course. He never used his own Optik, if he could help it. The GPS for the other external units was programmed to transmit random locations, scattered throughout the city. The call was answered immediately.
“Yes.” The voice was not that of a person – or rather it was like that of several persons, each digitally layered over the next, as if it were an unsettling choir speaking, rather than an individual. Coyle was not impressed. There were apps for everything nowadays.
The image on his display was slightly more impressive than the voice. It was… nothing. A face that was as much an absence as anything. A crackling, distorted hole in the digital world. If Coyle had been anyone else, he might have found it disturbing.
They called themselves “Zero Day”. There was some meaning to the alias, but they had not deigned to share it, and Coyle was not inclined to inquire about such matters, regarding it as outside his purview. What they called themselves made little difference to him, so long as they paid him in full, and in a timely fashion.
“It’s me,” he said. Something that might have been a smile crossed the void.
“We know. No one else has this number.” As ever, he thought he detected the slightest hint of a sneer in his employer’s attitude. He was used to that. It took a certain egotism to contract a killer. Often, his employers thought themselves his superiors – as if he were nothing more than a plumber.
“The secondary target has been taken care of.”
“And the primary?”
A loaded question. Coyle grunted. “You saw the news?”
“Yes. You failed.”
“Failure is a matter of perspective,” Coyle said, calmly. Getting angry at the client rarely helped. “I prefer to say that I have not yet succeeded.”
“We were under the impression you only needed one shot.”
Coyle allowed himself a laugh. “Hyperbole. I need as many shots as are required. One is the preferred number, obviously, but sometimes people don’t die when you want them to. So you have to keep trying until it gets done.”
Zero Day was silent, save for the crackle of the frequency. Then, “We needed this accomplished yesterday. The schedule–”
“Schedules change,” Coyle said. He still hadn’t been able to trace their true identity, or identities, if that was what the story was. He wasn’t certain as to anything about them: gender, race, creed – all mysteries. Coyle normally made it a point to know absolutely
