One of Zack’s sticky-armpitted clones spoke in a wheedling tone that probably got him slapped around a lot in school. “We don’t got any ashtrays in the other room.”
“Jesus Christ, Robbie, I got a guest here. I need an ashtray.”
“Got pizza boxes.”
“Do any of the boxes still have pizza in them?”
“I think maybe Natalie didn’t have the last slice of three-cheese.”
“So that’s our ashtray. Go get it. I’m really sorry about this, Mike. These people here are total fucking geniuses, but social skills? Forget it. Where was I?”
“Zack, I have no clue. Something about Osama bin Laden and cameras.”
“Yes. Dude. It’s all there.” He passed me a cigarette, I tossed him the lighter. “The guy with the camera and the proximity to extraordinary information and the access to the media—that guy wins.”
He tossed me the lighter back, and I thought a moment as I lit up. “So this is about cell phones with cameras.”
“Right. People with the proximity to extraordinary information—that’s anybody who happens to share a location with a sudden event, right? It used to happen with camcorders, people taping cops beating guys up for no reason other than that it got them off. But the thing about camcorders is that it’s pretty easy to see you’re using them.” He held up his cell phone. “What am I doing right now? Am I reading a text message? An instant message? Trying to dial a number? Taking a photo of you? Shooting a video?” He angled the phone down. “Holding it like this, I’m not shooting a video. But I could be recording audio. And these phones are everywhere, Mike. They’re in
“Soldiers in Iraq have cell phones?” Robbie put half a pizza box on the desk Zack was at, and Zack tipped ash on the rotting slice of pizza in there, which had to be at least a week old.
“Yeah.” Zack giggled. He liked this bit. “In fact, there was a bit of a scandal. U.S. troops were racking up insane phone bills calling home. There were charity initiatives to get prepaid cell phones to troops. So I created phones- forourboys.org. I’m paying for a lot of their phones. And every soldier in Iraq who turns on a cell phone? They get a text message from me. A text and a configurator, which is a program sent over the air to their phone that installs itself. Now, for one thing, you’ve got to love the idea that porn is buying cell phones for soldiers, right? But that’s not the bit that makes me fucking Einstein. The configurator is the bit that makes me fucking Einstein. Because it ties the phone to my system.”
I just smoked and waited, as he grinned. I didn’t need to prod him to keep talking. He was too into it, and I got the strong impression he didn’t meet too many new people, especially not people prepared to listen to him talk.
“Okay, okay, I’ll tell you.” He laughed. “If you take a picture or shoot some video on a cell phone, it gives you the option to send it to someone, right? On a phone I’ve configured, it gives you an extra option: send it to me. Send it to me, and it goes to one of the servers, the big computers, that I keep in other countries. Because I don’t need that shit on a computer in the U.S., you know? The content goes to me, and then my program sanitizes your phone. Deletes the content, the log of you sending it, everything. Did you catch the news this morning?”
“Five minutes in the airport at Vegas. Something about another clusterfuck in Iraq.”
“Lousy video quality, right?”
“Right. Yes. No. Hold on. You’re saying…”
“Yeah.”
“That was you? You got that footage out?”
“Yeah. Some grunt on the ground didn’t like the way things were going that day and grabbed thirty seconds on his phone. And sent it to me. Not that he knew it was me, of course. No names, no pack drill. Fronts and cover companies, like a CIA operation, dude. Heh.”
Zack jabbed out his cigarette in the pizza. There was a smell like plastic cooking over an uncleaned toilet. “You want a beer? Robbie, get us a couple of beers. Get beers for everybody. The cooler’s full, right? So I co-locate this stuff all over the world. So when the Russian cops come for the front company in Moscow, the pictures of Mafiya paying off Duma members that have been captured by ordinary people on the street aren’t on the servers in Moscow, you with me? They’re in Tuvalu or South Africa or some fucking place. And this here”—Zack gestured broadly at his Mission Control—“this tells me where all my information is, all over the world. Cell phones and Internet-connected computers, dude. It’s incredibly fucking simple. A support system for citizen journalism. News with no filters. And when we get something good, out it goes into the world. PyrE, see? I’ve given people all over the world the ability to fight power.”
Beer came. I hoisted my cold dewed bottle to Zack Pickles, mad scientist and the first genuinely decent guy I’d met in what seemed like forever.
Chapter 46
The clock ticked around a couple of hours, and I figured it was time to call it a day. Or at least lunch. My mood was much improved. I had no idea how to get back to the place, but, with the little information I had, Zack did some Internet wizardry and got a printer to spit out a map with
There was a big, black, shiny car in the driveway. The door was unlocked. As I pushed it open, I heard the unmistakable sound of Trix having an orgasm.
And, a few seconds later, the new sound of a complete stranger, quite definitely male, having his own orgasm.
Chapter 47
I decided to stay outside for a little while, and have a cigarette and concentrate hard on not killing anyone. I think I finished the first one in two minutes, just dragging the life out of it, the last minute of which I spent watching a black limousine creeping down the street toward me. As it pulled up outside the house, I dug my hands into my
